Pharma

Synthetic vaccine developer adds former Merck Vaccines president

A synthetic vaccine developer has added a former Merck vaccines president to its board of […]

A synthetic vaccine developer has added a former Merck vaccines president to its board of directors.

Dr. Adel A.F. Mahmoud joined the board of Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NYSE AMEX:INO) this week. He served as president of Merck Vaccines as well as Merck’s chief medical adviser for vaccines and infectious diseases for six years until 2005. For 25 years, he worked at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals of Cleveland, where he was chairman of medicine and physician-in-chief for 11 years until 1998.

Since 2007, he has been on the faculty at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.

The company’s stock jumped 8 percent by the close of trading following the news.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, has three drugs in phase 2 clinical trials to treat cervical cancer, HIV and malaria. Earlier this week, Inovio secured a patent for its synthetic vaccine for the H1N1 influenza virus.

The company was initially called VGX Pharmaceuticals, which was launched by Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim with his Ph.D. professor David Weiner of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, until it did a reverse merger with Inovio in 2009, which gave it a drug manufacturing base in Asia.

 

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