6 August 2020 - - Canadian government agencies will contribute up to CDN 4.75m to advance Phase 1 clinical development of Canada-based biopharmaceutical company IMV Inc's (NASDAQ: IMV) (TSX: IMV) vaccine candidate, DPX-COVID-19, for the prevention of COVID-19 infection caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2, the company said.

The company is receiving CDN 4.15m advisory services and funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Next Generation Manufacturing Canada to support rapid scale-up of DPX-COVID-19 manufacturing process and its evaluation in a phase 1 clinical trial.

In addition to this funding, IMV also received CDN 600,000 from the NRC IRAP Innovation Assistance Program (IRAP IAP).

IMV plans to use funding from to advance DPX-COVID-19 with a Phase I clinical trial starting this summer in Canada. A Phase 2 trial is expected to start by end of 2020 in the US and Canada following successful Phase 1 top-line results that are expected later this year.

The company will also scale-up manufacturing capacity for commercial production for North American and global markets.

DPX-based vaccines do not require biologic manufacturing which gives the company the potential for fast and large-scale manufacturing to supply a significant number of doses rapidly compared to more conventional vaccines.

DPX-COVID-19, instead of taking a traditional vaccine approach, blends vaccine and immunotherapy science to generate an immune response that targets specific weaknesses of the coronavirus, incorporating several unique key features with the goal to optimize potential safety and efficacy:

DPX-COVID-19 is a formulation of the DPX delivery platform with four complementary peptide antigens that were selected for their high immunogenicity and ability to bind non-overlapping areas on the virus spike and impact its infective function in preclinical studies,

Selected targets are outside of the 614 mutation which, according to recent research1,2 has been demonstrated to increase the virus' ability to infect cells in vitro and suggested to reduce vaccine-induced immunity.