April 22, 2020 / By Perry Chiaramonte, Angela Bertorelli | Fox News
Progress is being made toward a viable vaccine for the coronavirus, say researchers at a Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical company.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals along with the University of Pennsylvania’s research facility, the Wistar Institute, have been working on the vaccine as early as this past January. Originally reported by Fox News, the vaccine was fast-tracked into development after the Chinese government made the genome sequencing of COVID-19 public.
Nearly three months later, a crucial first phase of testing has begun. Researchers with Inovio say that they were able to design their vaccine in just three hours after receiving a sequence for the virus.
“We immediately started testing the vaccine in the laboratory. And we’re quite confident about the results that we’ve seen,” Dr. Kate Broderick, senior vice president, R&D at Inovio Pharmaceuticals, tells Fox News, adding that trials on human subjects began just last week. “We treated three people last week. But getting our vaccine into human beings is a huge step. But we did that in 83 days, which certainly in my career is absolutely an unprecedented level of speed.”
While testing has begun, Broderick says there are still too many unknown variables associated with the virus and how it may affect the vaccine.
