Open Orphan (AIM:ORPH ) has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Venn Life Sciences, (“Venn”) has been awarded two new contracts with unnamed European Pharmaceutical companies, worth an estimated 10% of the company’s total FY21 revenue in aggregate.
Contract #1
The first contract, which will commence immediately, is a COVID-19 study for a new European pharmaceutical client, which involves 200 patients at different 50 sites across five countries around the word.
Venn’s Paris team will be responsible for the entire management of this randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 Clinical Trial, with world-class supportive care for patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in a hospitalised setting, to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a two drug combination treatment.
Contract #2
Venn’s team which is based in the Breda office in the Netherlands has also won a substantial new contract with an existing European pharmaceutical client.
This contract builds on Venn’s existing relationship with this European pharmaceutical company whom Venn currently provides a variety of services to including IMPD writing, regulatory briefing book writing, preclinical and clinical consultancy.
This contract will see Venn deploy its expertise to assist in the design and implementation of new processes related to process improvement across clinical testing practices.
The contract, which starts immediately, will run until December 2021 and will deliver ‘significant revenues’ for Venn.
Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman, Open Orphan, said: “As we come towards the end of 2020, it’s wonderful to see all the elements of the Open Orphan business are delivering substantial revenues and both new contract wins and renewal of existing long-term customer contracts.
The merger and integration of Open Orphan, Venn and hVIVO is very much now completed, and having become profitable in Q4 2020, we now have a very valuable, fast growing and secure business on our hands.
Both Venn and hVIVO are converting their substantial pipeline of work whilst providing a high-quality service to their customers. The Paris team’s contract is a further demonstration of our work in the fight against COVID-19 and the contract win by our Dutch Breda team shows how we continue to generate repeat business through our expertise.
I am very excited by the momentum in the business and look forward to providing further updates in the weeks and months ahead of what is going to be a very exciting 2021”.
Shares in ORPH have performed exceptionally strongly since the beginning of the COVID0-19 crisis, rising from less than 5p in January to closing at 23.5p prior to this announcement.
3 Reasons to Follow Open Orphan:
Open Orphan is a rapidly growing CRO pharmaceutical services company which is the world leader in the testing of vaccines and antivirals using human challenge clinical trials.
Open Orphan comprises of two commercial specialist CRO services businesses, hVIVO and Venn Life Sciences and is also building out a valuable data platform business. All businesses are now working closely together to offer upselling and cross selling opportunities.
World Class Facilities
Open has Europe's only 24-bedroom quarantine clinic with onsite virology providing individually isolated rooms and specialist laboratory facilities. The hVIVO facility offers highly specialised virology and immunology laboratory services to support pre-clinical and clinical respiratory drug, antiviral, and vaccine discovery and development.
Largest Test Portfolio
The Company has a leading portfolio of 8 viral challenge study models, which are: 2 FLU, 2 RSV, 1 HRV, 1 Asthma, 1 cough and 1 COPD viral challenge models. As announced in early March 2020, Open Orphan is also rapidly advancing several Coronavirus challenge study models and expects to be helping many COVID-19 vaccine development companies to test their vaccines.
No other company in the world has such a portfolio, with only two competitors globally having 1 challenge study model each. hVIVO also works with companies in the UK and Ireland to provide COVID-19 testing to staff to protect staff and customers from a workplace COVID-19 outbreak through its COVID Clear offering.
Rapidly Expanding Market with Regular Positive Newsflow
The market for vaccine development and testing has grown rapidly over the past six months, largely due to the outbreak of Covid-19.
However, Open Orphan now believes Governments and International pharmaceutical companies around the world will be making enormous ‘catch-up investments’ in all types of vaccine development to ensure the effects of any pandemic can be mitigated in the future, which should result in the hVIVO facility being booked out for months, if not years, in advance going forward.
The Company is committed to providing regular Newsflow to ensure investors of all classes are fully briefed on the Investment opportunity for Open Orphan.