Open Orphan Ramps Up Lab Services Revenue

Open Orphan plc (ORPH FOLLOW) has announced three additional Laboratory Services Contracts with third parties as part of its commercialisation strategy to offer its world class hVIVO laboratory services to third parties.

These new contracts represent additional and complementary revenue streams for the Company with customers who are at the bleeding edge of new vaccines and anti-virals development that require access to a dedicated virology laboratory.

We understand approximately £10m has been invested in the hVIVO laboratory over the past couple of years, by the previous management team, for internal vaccine and anti-viral development. This means the lab was ultimately only utilised up to 20%.

There is therefore a clear and significant opportunity for ORPH to sell the unutilised laboratory testing capacity to small-cap pharma companies and biotech companies, few of whom have their own dedicated virology laboratory.

The three new contracts announced today comprise of:

NoBAZ Ltd

A second contract with NoBACZ Ltd., the spin-out company from of the University of Cambridge for the development of an environmentally friendly antimicrobial, antiviral coating that prevents common-touch surfaces from being a major source of infection transmission during and beyond the COVID-19 outbreak.

NoBACZ Ltd is working with hVIVO to test its products against a range of viruses, including coronaviruses and ultimately, against SARS-CoV-2, the virus strain that causes COVID-19 disease. If successful, the long-lasting coating can be applied to high-touch surfaces in public transport, office buildings, hospitals, gyms, care-homes, and supermarkets.

Jonathan Powell, CEO of NoBACZ said: "We are delighted to be working with hVIVO, a world-leading virology laboratory and pioneer of viral challenge studies, in our efforts to evaluate NoBACZ's ground-breaking coating technology and its effectiveness at contact-killing respiratory viruses.

hVIVO has the requisite experience and professional commercial focus to execute our pivotal studies rapidly and efficiently, allowing us to move forward in our ambitions to provide a quick-to-market solution for protecting the public against a resurgence of COVID-19 or similar outbreaks."

Nearmedic International Ltd

ORPH is working with Nearmedic International Ltd to support the development of a RegG3 drug as a treatment for COVID-19 followed by the expansion of this product into several additional disease areas such as Cystic Fibrosis.

Rupert Holms, Chairman of Nearmedic said: “hVIVO and Open Orphan have the unique combination of skills which shall help Nearmedic to get its novel ezrin peptide technology to the global pharmaceutical markets and help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic"

Unnamed Biotec

ORPH also announced a contract to run in vitro testing from its laboratory for an unnamed biotech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

Shares in OPRH have strongly traded year to date, starting the year at 4.6p and closing yesterday at 6.5.

ORPH price chart

Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said: “We are now continuing to sign additional new virology services contracts with third party customers and, as such, this is delivering upon one of our key commitments from when we acquired hVIVO earlier this year that, as part of our growth strategy, we were going to expand the range of our service offerings to third party pharmaceutical and biotech companies. I am excited by this area of growth for Open Orphan as we seek to maximise the value out of our fantastic facilities in East London.”