Open Orphan plc (ORPH) has extended its consultancy services contracts with a top-3 global pharmaceutical client to December 2021.
Open Orphan provides independent, up-to-date and hands-on Chemistry, Manufacturing & Control (“CMC”) consultancy services, through the Venn Life Sciences (“Venn”) team in the Breda office in the Netherlands, to a leading global pharmaceutical client.
These contracts were originally signed in 2012 for Venn’s CMC consultancy team provide essential support for two of this client’s vaccine development programmes and these successful collaborations have been extended until December 2021.
Venn’s CMC consultancy services focus on the strategic and technical aspects of pharmaceutical development and support the management of pharmaceutical development programmes covering small molecules and biologicals from chemical or cell line development up to submission of marketing authorisation application.
Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said: "This contract renewal underpins our confidence in delivering against ambitious growth targets for 2021 and securing strong revenue visibility moving forward. Open Orphan’s strengths lie in the established relationships we have with our pharmaceutical partners and we expect to continue to extend these relationships as well as focussing on converting the existing pipeline of new business opportunities we have before us.
Shares in Open Orphan have increased more than 5x over the past 12 months and importantly for investors, these contract extensions demonstrate Venn is perfectly placed, as one of the world leaders in vaccine development services, to benefit from high levels of investment from Big Pharma into Vaccine development – post a 30-year long underinvestment period. Furthermore, we understand these two contracts are outside Venn’s usual sphere of flu and RSV vaccine development, demonstrating Venn’s expanding addressable market.
Cathal added: “Market consensus forecast a significant increase in revenues in 2021. As we remain on target to be operationally profitable in the final quarter of this year, we also expect to see a significant impact on earnings next year from this revenue growth.”
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 through the use of 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 a number of 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.