Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc. announces that the company’s Phase 2 clinical trial of Brilacidin for treating COVID-19 is scheduled to begin next week. The Phase 2 randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial is to include approximately 120 hospitalized patients with moderate-to-severe COVID-19. Two intravenous treatment arms are to be enrolled—active and placebo, with ~60 patients per arm. The trial’s primary endpoint is time to sustained recovery through Day 29 based on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT) clinical status ordinal scale. Other endpoints include: in-hospital outcomes, all-cause mortality, measurement of inflammation-related biomarkers, changes to SARS-CoV-2 viral load, and other key measures. The Company believes Brilacidin holds tremendous promise to help address the global pandemic, particularly given the emergence [1] of contagious and virulent coronavirus variants. Data increasingly are showing these variants can significantly lessen the effectiveness of COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. For example, a Phase 2b trial in South Africa showed the Novavax vaccine was less than 50% effective against a new coronavirus variant originally identified in that country.