Inovio Pharmaceuticals (formerly Genetronics), specializes in developing technology and hardware that has the potential to allow physicians to more efficiently and cost-effectively deliver life-saving drugs or beneficial genes to patients with catastrophic illnesses, including cancer. The company is the technology leader in electroporation therapy (EPT), the application of very brief, carefully controlled, pulsed electric fields, to human cells. This process causes pores to open in the cell membrane and allows pharmaceuticals or genes, injected in the area prior to the application of the electric pulse, to gain access to the cell's interior. The cell pores close up a short time later, trapping the chemotherapeutic agents inside the cancer cell, so they can destroy the cell

EMS and SolidWorks play a vital role in evaluating the electrical fields used with Inovio's electroporation devices, helping to determine and optimize the electrical field strength throughout the volume of space around the electrodes

EMS and SolidWorks have significantly sped up Inovio product development. "The time savings are so dramatic they are, in a sense, unquantifiable," says Andre. "Using EMS, we can change an electrode geometry and analyze an electrical field within a half hour. If we had to do these three dimensional calculations for the more complicated electrode geometries by hand, it would take days."