Setting Ego Aside To Better Human Health

Kate Broderick, SVP of research and development at INOVIO and one of In Vivo’s 2021 rising leaders, is hopeful that greater collaboration will be the lasting effect of COVID-19.

Back To Rising Leaders Gallery

In her role as INOVIO Pharmaceuticals, Inc.’s senior vice president of research and development, Kate Broderick, an accomplished scientist and vaccine expert, leads a team of researchers discovering and developing DNA medicines.

Working out of the company’s research labs in San Diego, Broderick is focused on the development and enhanced delivery of a broad range of DNA medicines for infectious diseases and cancers. Most recently, she was responsible for the development of a novel DNA vaccine for COVID-19. She also led the team that brought the first in human Lassa fever vaccine into the clinic and advanced the development of a DNA vaccine for the MERS virus.  

Kate Broderick INOVIO

Broderick is based in California, but the scientist is Scottish and holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow. After this, she sought a new opportunity in another country and landed a role at the University of California, San Diego, in drug discovery.  After five years at the university, Broderick decided to take a more “translational” slant and joined the team at INOVIO as a scientist. In her 15 years at the company, Broderick has moved through different positions of increasing responsibility – developing her skill set as the biotech also expanded. “It's been just an amazing experience,” she told In Vivo in a recent interview. “When I joined INOVIO there were 15 of us. And there's now 350. It's been a fantastic experience to see that kind of growth in a company over those years.”

Thinking about the differences in her role as a scientist and her job today leading R&D teams at INOVIO, Broderick says she enjoys the people management aspect of overseeing drug and vaccine development. “As a scientist you're primarily at the bench, which is exciting and frustrating. It is very much a hands-on technical role … As much as I love the hardcore science, I really enjoy the people management aspect. I enjoy taking a step back from that hands-on technical aspect and leaving that to the team who absolutely have a passion for it and really thrive in that area. This lets me take more of a strategic oversight and people management position.”

 

'Being able to utilize our technology to apply to those really devastating public health targets is so incredibly rewarding.'

 

Broderick was keen to emphasize the potential of INOVIO’s technology. “DNA based vaccines or therapies really have the opportunity to change the paradigm of medicine today,” she said. “Working with that technology has allowed me to work on such diverse disease targets: Ebola, Lassa fever, MERS, HIV, influenza. Such pressing infectious disease targets that you can't help but get emotionally involved with, they're so devastating.”

INOVIO is focused on bringing to market precisely designed and delivered DNA medicines to treat and protect people from serious and life-threatening diseases associated with HPV, cancer and infectious diseases.

Broderick cited COVID-19 as well, another disease INOVIO has ongoing development programs for. But despite COVID’s huge global impact and effect on day-to-day life worldwide, Broderick is keen to highlight the company’s work in other infectious diseases too. “Prior to COVID, think about the impact that Ebola outbreaks had – although very much less covered in the media. And Lassa fever has killed many more people in Africa than Ebola ever has, and on a very annual basis. Being able to utilize our technology to apply to those really devastating public health targets is so incredibly rewarding.”

Exhibit 1.

 

Responding To COVID

When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in 2020, INOVIO was perfectly positioned to respond to the developing situation. “Our whole technological platform is geared for rapid responses to pandemic outbreaks. So, in a sense, this was a real opportunity for us to showcase what our technology could do,” Broderick said. She noted that researchers at INOVIO were able to pivot quickly to COVID-19. “That speaks to the strength of INOVIO as a company, that we were able to, essentially overnight, put a lot of emphasis into vaccine research for COVID, while still maintaining our pipeline.”

Her passion for the company’s work is obvious but leading R&D teams in 2020 was not an easy job. “I’ve learned so much, and we've learned so much, about how to work more efficiently, how to streamline some of our processes, so that we can go as fast as possible. It has been probably the most challenging 15 months of my career, but also the most rewarding 15 months of my career. Everything that we've ever trained for has really come to pass over this time.”

While the industry has learned a lot about how to be better prepared, Broderick does not think vaccine timelines in the future will be able to match the speed of COVID-19 developments. “This was an extraordinary circumstance.” But she does hope lessons from 2020 can be used to improve processes. “I think there should be a lot of analysis, looking back and seeing what we did right, what could have been done better and what should be in place for the future … So that we are better prepared the next time around.”

Broderick is pleased with the uptake of available COVID-19 vaccines so far but has concerns about the impact of new virus variants that are emerging. This remains an area of focus for INOVIO, which is developing a pan-COVID vaccine – a next generation vaccine that can cover various strains of the virus. But the biggest challenge for this vaccine program is the unknowns about SARS-CoV-2. “You can make all your best predictions and designs based on the variants that we know about today. But the virus always feels like it's always two or three steps ahead of us, because it's already mutating.”

Broderick hopes for better use of technology to help predict evolution of the virus over time and better surveillance for virus variants. “We think our technology is perfectly placed to come up with vaccines that will be able to counterbalance the threat of the variants that we know about, but also for the ones that we don't know about yet. That's a that's going to be a major source of our activities in the next year.”

A New Plan For Phase III Development

A positive upside from the COVID-19 pandemic is the increase in collaborative action between the drug development industry, governments, and non-profits, as well as new partnerships between pharma and biotech companies. “People really put down egos and those competitive edges to work together for humankind,” Broderick said.

INOVIO has been working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CEPI and the US Department of Defense, to name a few. Broderick hopes that some of these relationships will continue post-pandemic.

However, it is that DoD partnership that has rocked the company in spring 2021, causing its share price to drop significantly in April 2021.

Last month, the US Department of Defense announced that it was halting funding for the Phase III trial of INOVIO’s COVID-19 vaccine, INO-4800. While the DoD said its decision was made based on the availability of other COVID-19 vaccines in the US, the announcement had a big effect, initially pushing shares of INOVIO down by around 25% on 23 April. The company is now planning for a predominantly ex-US Phase III trial of INO-4800 and is working with the Seoul-based non-profit International Vaccine Institute and China's Advaccine Biopharmaceuticals Suzhou Co. Ltd.

 

'You can have different platforms, different technologies, different companies working on different targets, but still have collaboration and that sense of working towards a common goal.' 

 

The company previously had problems with an FDA partial hold on the Phase III trial of INO-4800 over questions relating to an intradermal delivery device it uses for the vaccine. INO-4800 is a DNA-based vaccine candidate composed of an optimized DNA plasmid. The approach differs from the major vaccine players’ strategy of using mRNA (Pfizer Inc. and Moderna, Inc.), adenoviruses (Johnson & Johnsonand AstraZeneca PLC) and protein-based delivery (Novavax, Inc.)

Despite potential challenges ahead for INOVIO’s COVID-19 vaccine, the company has a busy pipeline addressing other serious infectious diseases. “As things start to settle down, we hope that we can really continue to push forward on those other programs.”

And Broderick still believes greater collaboration should be the lasting effect of COVID-19. “You can have different platforms, different technologies, different companies working on different targets, but still have collaboration and that sense of working towards a common goal. If that's something that we can continue to do, I think that would be an amazing outcome of a terrible situation.”