ORPH expands volunteer recruitment centres for human challenge trials

Open Orphan (ORPH ) has opened two new volunteer recruitment centres to screen potential trial volunteers for the expansion of its human challenge study trials launching this year.

The specialist pharmaceutical services clinical research organisation said the first recruitment centre is in East London while the second is located in central Manchester.

The first new volunteer recruitment site is a repurposed former coffee shop at street level next door to the Queen Mary BioEnterprise Innovation Centre (“QMB”), which houses hVIVO’s current 24-bedroom state-of-the-art quarantine clinic in Whitechapel, East London.

The company told investors that this is the first time a branded volunteer recruitment centre has been at street level whereby volunteers can walk straight in for screening.

This new centre, which the group noted has processed its first volunteers in recent weeks, is described as a ‘large, multi-use space’. The company detailed that this new centre has the capacity to provide ‘substantially more volunteer medical screening and processing.’

The group said the centre hosts ‘dedicated private physical exam and consenting rooms, ample hot-desking space and a refreshment area, as well as a dedicated reception area.’

‘Importantly,’ the company highlighted, ‘this means the facility can now offer 520 volunteer recruitment visit slots per week, with the intention that this will increase over time.’

Meanwhile, the company announced that it has opened another similar volunteer recruitment facility in central Manchester in order to broaden its reach and to reduce travel time required by potential volunteers to attend the initial visit at the group’s London clinic.

The facility, which is due to process its first volunteers on 27 January, will have an initial capacity for more than 100 visits per week, increasing substantially in the weeks that follow. 

“We are delighted to have had the opportunity to get access to these new volunteer recruitment screening centres and to have them fully operational so quickly.

The current pandemic has forced many businesses to close and we are able to provide another use for these spaces not currently in use,” said Executive Chairman , Cathal Friel.

He added, “These spaces presented an opportunity for us to open street level volunteer recruitment centres quickly and efficiently. The number of volunteers required by hVIVO is increasing rapidly in line with the number of studies the company is running, and these two additional centres will allow us to increase our capacity substantially in the year ahead.

We are proud of our hard working and dedicated team for transforming both of these sites in record time into volunteer recruitment screening centres where we can efficiently process more volunteers than ever before.”

The company also informed investors that given its extensive pipeline of upcoming contracted studies, it is also continuing to explore additional quarantine facilities.

Clearly ORPH is already planning for another record year in terms of revenue and profits with the opening of these ‘cost effective’ volunteers recruitment centres. The Company’s ability to rapidly scale this year will be key in achieving these ambitions and we understand the Company is already considering additional quarantine facilities options given the Company’s existing 24-bed state of the art quarantine facility in East London and its quarantine ward at the Royal Free Hospital are now fully booked until year end. Shares in ORPH have increased by over 300% in value since the beginning of April 2020 and further positive Newsflow on its capacity expansion program should underpin FY21e expectations.

Reasons to Follow ORPH

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

The Group comprises 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 with 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, 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.