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Open Orphan inks two-year contract with tier 1 German pharmaceutical firm

07:30, 30th October 2020
Francesca Morgan
RNS Newswire
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Open Orphan (AIM:ORPH FOLLOW) said it has inked a new two-year contract with a tier 1 German pharmaceutical company which is one of Europe’s top research-driven pharma companies. 

The group, which focuses on testing vaccines and antivirals using human challenge clinical trials said the contract guarantees two years of revenue and will commence this month.  

The contract will see the Venn Life Sciences (“Venn”), part of Open Orphan’s Breda office in the Netherlands, build upon its existing relationship with the unnamed German firm. 

Currently, Venn already undertakes work for the client, providing support in quantitative sciences, in both pharmacokinetics and pharmacometrics, as well as earlier stage projects. 

As pharmacometrics (studying a drug's molecular, biochemical, and physiologic effects) becomes an integral part of regulatory submissions, the Venn team in Breda is increasing its specialisation here with the aim of becoming the European leader in this kind of analysis.  

“Open Orphan’s subsidiaries continue to excel, highlighting the well-rounded expertise of the group and in turn maximising shareholder value,” said Executive Chairman, Cathal Friel. 

He added, “This new contract further demonstrates Open Orphan’s ability to execute on its significant pipeline of contracts with major pharmaceutical businesses. It also demonstrates Venn Life Sciences position as a market leader in its field.” 

Shares in Open Orphan have skyrocketed in value by over 400% since April 2020 to close at 25p on Thursday afternoon trading. 

ORPH price chart

More on Open Orphan 

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. To date, hVIVO has built up one of the world’s largest databases of infectious disease progression data and the group is populating its Open Orphan Health Data platform with this all hVIVO data. 

Open Orphan recently announced that its subsidiary, hVIVO, has signed a contract with the UK Government to develop a COVID-19 human challenge study model to speed up the development of an efficacious vaccine in a deal that could be worth up to £10 million.

hVIVO has the world's leading portfolio of 8 human challenge study models developed to date and has safely run more human challenge studies than any other company globally.   

The UK Government has secured the first three slots to test vaccines using hVIVO's COVID-19 challenge study, which it expects to start in 2021, each slot reservation has been secured at a cost of £2.5m each bringing the total value of these slot reservations to £7.5m. 

The model development involves the manufacturing the challenge virus as well as the first-in-human characterisation study for the virus. Following the group’s achievement of regulatory and ethical approval, the study is expected to be completed in May 2021. 

ORPH announced back in March 2020 that it was developing the world's first commercial human coronavirus challenge study model, known as Controlled Human Infection Model. 

The Financial Times reported in late September 2020 that Open Orphan would be the first company in the world to conduct a human challenge trial for Covid-19 that will see healthy subjects "infected" with the virus to test the effectiveness of the vaccines being developed. 

In its results for the six months ended 30 June 2020, the group said it had secured larger, more profitable contracts with large pharma and leading vaccine developers globally. 

“Earlier this year we set ourselves the target of being profitable in the second half of 2020 and I am delighted to confirm that, despite profitability taking a few months longer than expected, we are on target to be operationally profitable in Q4 2020,” Friel said last month.  

While the market has already been informed that these COVID-19 challenge studies could be valued within £8-£10m, the new contract takes the potential value up to a further £30m in aggregate, taking the total value of the contract with the UK Government close to £40m. 

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