New 2-year contract with a tier 1 German company

30 October 2020

Open Orphan plc

("Open Orphan" or the "Company")

New 2-year contract with a tier 1 German pharmaceutical company

Open Orphan plc (ORPH), a rapidly growing specialist CRO pharmaceutical services company which is the world leader in the testing of vaccines and antivirals using human challenge clinical trials is pleased to announce a new 2-year contract with a tier 1 German pharmaceutical company which is one of Europe's top research-driven pharmaceutical companies.  

The contract guarantees annual revenue, for the next two years, with work under the contract to commence this month. The contract will see the Venn Life Sciences ("Venn"), part of Open Orphan plc, Breda office in the Netherlands, build upon its strong existing relationship with this German pharmaceutical company.

This contract is an extension of the relationship built with the leading German pharmaceutical company. The new contract is in addition to the work currently undertaken by Venn, to the client, providing support in quantitative sciences (pharmacokinetics and pharmacometrics) as well as earlier stage projects.

As pharmacometric analysis is becoming an ever more important part of regulatory submissions, the Venn team in Breda is increasing its specialisation with the ambition of becoming the European leader in pharmacometric analysis.

Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman, Open Orphan, said:

"Open Orphan's subsidiaries continue to excel, highlighting the well-rounded expertise of the group and in turn maximising shareholder value. This contract delivers on a number of our ambitions, it is a large multi-year contract generating recurring revenues, it is with a large partner and it utilises our expertise in pharmacometric analysis."

"This new contract further demonstrates Open Orphan's ability to execute on its significant pipeline of contracts with major pharmaceutical business. It also demonstrates Venn Life Sciences position as a market leader in its field."

Footnote

Pharmacometrics: Pharmacometrics is a discipline that integrates biology, pharmacology, physiology and pathophysiology in mathematical and statistical models to describe and quantify the interactions between drugs and patients. i.e. involves the analysis and interpretation of data produced in pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Pharmacokinetics: the branch of pharmacology that studies the fate of pharmacological substances in the body, as their absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination.

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Notes to Editors - Open Orphan:

Open Orphan is a rapidly growing niche CRO pharmaceutical services company which is a world leader in the testing of vaccines and antivirals through the use of human challenge clinical trials. Conducted from Europe's only 24-bedroom quarantine clinic with onsite virology providing individually isolated rooms and connected to our specialist laboratory facility. hVIVO's challenge studies require healthy volunteers to take part, volunteers are recruited through FluCamp, learn more at www.FluCamp.com. 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.  Reliable laboratory analysis underpinned by scientific expertise is essential when processing and analysing clinical samples. Robust quality processes support our team of scientists in the delivery of submission ready data.

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, Open Orphan is 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. 

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. hVIVO has built up one of the world's largest databases of infectious disease progression data and we are populating our Open Orphan Health Data platform with this historical hVIVO data. In our clinical trials going forward, we are also planning to collect data on volunteer's via wearables during clinical trials. Therefore, Open Orphan's data, which may yield valuable digital biomarkers, could be one of the more sought-after datasets by many of the large wearables /smart watch wearables providers around the world. In June 2019, Open Orphan acquired AIM-listed Venn Life Sciences Holdings plc in a reverse take-over and in January 2020 it completed the merger with hVIVO plc in January 2020. Venn is an integrated drug development consultancy firm which offers CMC (chemistry, manufacturing and controls), preclinical, Phase I & II clinical trials design and execution. The merger with hVIVO created a European full pharma services company broadening the Company's customer base and with complementary specialist CRO services, widened the range of the Company's service offerings.