Happy Easter, world. He has risen.

In much the same way that Christ came to life on Easter, there are those who are working hard to develop a vaccine for COVID19 to preserve our lives.

We hear about this, but I never get the details. So, I researched several promising efforts and want to share one with you.

Remember this name: INOVIO PHARMACEUTICALS.

On 3 March 2020, the President and CEO of Inovio, Dr. J Joseph Kim shared his company’s plans to develop a vaccine (INO-4800) for the treatment of COVID 19. He called it an “accelerated plan.”

Fast forward, two days ago Inovio announced that it had initiated on 6 April — with FDA approval — the first phase clinical trials of its vaccine on real people, though a small sample.

Inovio received the first sequenced genome of the COVID19 virus from the Chinese on 10 January 2020 and three hours later it had used its digital wizardry to create a digital vaccine.

The first human test happened 83 days later and on 6 April Inovio began a test on 40 healthy volunteer adults in Philadelphia and Kansas City.

The Philadelphia test is being conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Kansas City test is being conducted at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research.

The actual test is an injection (there is some complexity to this) of the INO-4800 vaccine four weeks apart with results expected by the end of the summer. The testers will be looking for the presence of anti-bodies to COVID19.

Prior animal tests had been successful as a prelude to this first phase human test program.

Other pre-clinical tests are being conducted in parallel with the phase one human clinical trial. Some of these will be “challenge tests” which are ethically contentious as they entail injecting a perfectly healthy test subject with the virus. I will not be volunteering for this particular test.

If these trials are positive, then larger scale second phase human tests will begin shortly thereafter.

Inovio plans to have more than 1,000,000  doses of vaccine before the end of the year. Unfortunately, that is not the finish line and more approvals will be required after the first and second phase tests.

There may be a way to receive an “emergency” treatment, but the rules are still murky.

Who is Inovio, Big Red Car?

Inovio is a biotechnology company that creates DNA medicines to treat, cure, and protect people from terrible diseases. Name a disease and they are, likely, on it.

They are collaborators with Advaccine, ApolloBio Corporation, AstraZeneca, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)/DOD, GeneOne Life Science/VGXI, HIV Vaccines Trial Network, Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC), National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Ology Bioservices, Plumbline Life Sciences, Regeneron, Roche/Genentech, University of Pennsylvania, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and The Wistar Institute.

This particular program for INO-4800 is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

VGXI, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of GeneOne Life Science (KSE: 011000) and Inovio’s manufacturing partner for the last 13 years, enabled the expedited manufacture, testing, and release of the INO-4800 plasmid clinical product.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has also funded INOVIO’s collaborator Ology Bioservices to manufacture additional doses of INO-4800.

They are the real deal.

Bottom line it, Big Red Car

The bottom line is that the work on a COVID19 vaccine is underway. Will it be done next month? No.

Nothing I have written is intended to suggest it will not take 18 months to a vaccine, but I do point out that 10 weeks to a first phase human trial is, apparently, lightning fast. So, we shall see.

In the meantime, stay safe. Wash those hands and start smiling. One day we will have a vaccine.