Penny Stock Ocugen Rips Higher By 130% On Vaccine News

Shares of Ocugen Inc OCGN, a micro-cap biopharma, gap-opened Tuesday's session higher and are trading with noteworthy gains.

What Happened: Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Ocugen said it has signed a binding letter of intent to co-develop India-based Bharat Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate codenamed Covaxin - an advanced stage whole-viron inactivated vaccine candidate - for use in the U.S. market.

Ocugen will get the U.S. rights to the investigational vaccine and will be responsible for clinical development, registration and commercialization.

Details of the definitive agreement will be finalized in the next few weeks.

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Ocugen said it has assembled a vaccine scientific advisory board, or VSAB, comprising leading academic and industry experts, in preparation for the development of Covaxin.

The adjuvanted inactivated virus vaccine candidate elicited strong IgG responses against spike protein, receptor-binding domain and the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2 along with strong cellular responses in Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials.

Why It's Important: Covaxin is different from other options currently available in the U.S. market, with potentially broader coverage against multiple protein antigens of the virus," said Harvey Rubin, a member of Ocugen's VSAB.

This could be a distinct advantage against the backdrop of SARS-CoV-2 mutating to produce new strains.

The stock was up more than 130% to 70 cents a share at publication time.