Open Orphan (LON:ORPH) has announced its Paris subsidiary Venn Life Sciences (“Venn”) has signed a new contract with an unnamed major European pharmaceutical company.
In particular, Venn will be assisting a prospective, multicentre, longitudinal, non-interventional oncology study, which is expected to enrol over 750 subjects.
As a key partner in the study, Venn will handle all data management, statistics and medical writing for the study.
For ORPH investors the new contract provides further evidence the re-organisation the Company undertook last year, resulting in the closure of facilities in Dublin, Hogeveen, Germany and Belfast, has not diminished the Company’s ability to secure significant multi-year contracts with multinational pharmaceutical companies.
Furthermore, synergies and operating leverage from the collaboration between the Venn team in Paris and hVIVO in London will enable further margin expansion as more of the higher margin services are brought in-house.
Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said: “ This industry leading team in our Paris office has the knowledge and track record which has allowed us to continue to grow the business by winning large, long-term contracts such as the one we have announced today.”
We look forward to delivering on the contract and continuing to support large pharmaceutical companies as we rapidly grow Open Orphan.”
Shares in ORPH have climbed strongly since April this year from lows of 4.9p to close yesterday at 14.85p
This contract clearly reinforces Venn’s position as one of the leading providers of data-management, statistics and medical writing services to many of Europe’s leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Cathal added “Venn Life Sciences Holdings plc which is now part of Open Orphan plc acquired Cardinal Systems in Paris in 2014. Cardinal had a history dating back to 1996 of providing high-quality data-management, statistics and randomisation services to many of Europe’s leading pharmaceutical companies in particular with a focus in the French pharma and biotech sector.
In the past year since Open Orphan acquired Venn, we have substantially rationalised and restructured the Paris based team who are now incentivised to grow the business going forward with a strong focus on the original Cardinal Systems’ core skills in biometry including data management, statistics, and medical writing.
Since our acquisition of hVIVO in January, our Venn team in Paris are also providing biometry services to hVIVO as part of their challenge study contracts and thereby improving the overall margin of challenge study delivery. Previously, hVIVO outsourced required biometry services to a third party.”