Open Orphan (ORPH) has announced a further contract renewal with Carna Biosciences Inc, (“Carna”) thereby extending its integrated drug development consultancy services with Venn Life Sciences. 
 
Carna is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company which focuses on the discovery and development of innovative therapies to treat serious unmet medical needs. 
 
The specialist pharmaceutical services clinical research organisation said the renewal of this contract is expected to deliver significant revenue for its Venn division over the next year. 
 
The team at Venn, who are situated in the Breda office in the Netherlands, will provide Chemistry, Manufacturing & Control (“CMC”), Non-Clinical, Clinical and Regulatory consultancy services to this client for two of the client's leading development programmes. 
 
This successful collaboration with Carna Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company which focuses on the discovery and development of innovative therapies to treat serious unmet medical needs, has been extended until the end of December 2021, it noted. 
 
Commenting on the contract renewal, Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan stated, “The extension of this contract further demonstrates our ability to collaborate successfully with our clients and provide a service that results in repeat business.” 
 
He added, “Venn and Carna have built up a good working relationship over a period of several years where both parties closely collaborated on drug development planning and its execution through consultancy services contracts.” 
 
Masaaki Sawa, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development at Carna Biosciences, said: “The partnership with Venn Life Sciences complements our clinical development team and underlines our commitment to become a clinical stage company. By continuing the collaboration with the Venn team, we will accelerate our drug development.” 
 
Venn will be providing Carna with business critical CMC, Non-Clinical, Clinical, and also Regulatory consultancy services for two of their leading drug development programmes. Sticky customers are key to building any business and its clear Venn and Carna have built up a good working relationship over several years and this extension further demonstrates Open Orphan’s ability to collaborate and deliver value to its clients. Shares in Open Orphan have increased by over 300% in value since the beginning of April 2020, trading within a range of 22p and 25p over the past two weeks. 
 

Reasons to Follow OPRH

Open Orphan is a rapidly growing Contract Research Organisation and world leader in the testing of vaccines and antivirals through the use of human challenge clinical trials. 
 
The Group 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

Open Orphan 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, it is rapidly advancing several COVID-19 challenge study models and expects to be helping many COVID-19 vaccine development companies to test their vaccines. 
 
hVIVO works with UK and Irish companies to provide COVID-19 testing to staff to protect staff and customers from a workplace COVID-19 outbreak through its COVID Clear offering. 
The company announced that its first volunteer had been dosed with the Codagenix needle free, intranasal COVID-19 vaccine, COVI-VAC as part of a Phase I clinical trial of COVI-VAC currently being carried out by hVIVO, at its facility in the UK. 

Rapidly Expanding Market

The market for vaccine development and testing has grown rapidly over the past six months, largely due to the outbreak of Covid-19. 
 
However, ORPH 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 it said should result in the hIVO facility being booked out for months, if not years, in advance going forward. 

Planned Disposal

When Open Orphan acquired hVIVO in January 2020, hVIVO also came with a number of non-core assets including a 62.6% stake in PrEP Biopharm. However, the new Open Orphan Board and management team are primarily focussed upon cementing its position as a unique CRO and ‘world leader vaccine and antiviral testing using human challenge study models, and therefore earmarked all non-core assets for disposal. 
 
The options for disposal of this unique asset are exciting, numerous and particularly timely given its mode of action. These options could include a trade sale to a Big-Pharma for cash, reverse the asset into the resurgence of listed SPACs and Cash Shells, or even Spin the asset out into a newly listed entity delivering investors dividends in specie of newly formed companies. 
 
In any event, OPRH shareholders would do well to remain on the Shareholder register when this transaction takes place as, whilst the valuation of PrEP Biopharm is currently unknown, with little carrying value on the Open Orphan balance sheet, it should advance the share price accordingly.