Open Orphan PLC - Contract renewal with top-3 pharmaceutical client

22 December 2020

Open Orphan plc

("Open Orphan" or the "Company")

Contract renewal with top-3 global pharmaceutical client

Successful extension of contract underpins 2021 revenue growth expectations

Open Orphan plc (AIM: ORPH), a rapidly growing specialist pharmaceutical services CRO and a world leader in vaccine and antiviral testing using human challenge clinical trials, announces a contract renewal extending its consultancy services with a major top-3 global pharmaceutical client to December 2021.

Through the Venn Life Sciences ("Venn") team in the Breda office in the Netherlands, Open Orphan provides independent, up-to-date and hands-on Chemistry, Manufacturing & Control ("CMC") consultancy services to a leading global pharmaceutical client and has done since 2012. Venn's CMC consultancy team provide essential support for two of this client's vaccine development programmes and these successful collaborations have been extended until December 2021.

Venn's CMC consultancy services focus on the strategic and technical aspects of pharmaceutical development and

support the management of pharmaceutical development programmes covering small molecules and biologicals from chemical or cell line development up to submission of marketing authorisation application.

Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said: "This contract renewal underpins our confidence in delivering against ambitious growth targets for 2021 and securing strong revenue visibility moving forward. Open Orphan's strengths lie in the established relationships we have with our pharmaceutical partners and we expect to continue to extend these relationships as well as focussing on converting the existing pipeline of new business opportunities we have before us.

"Market consensus forecast a significant increase in revenues in 2021. As we remain on target to be operationally profitable in the final quarter of this year, we also expect to see a significant impact on earnings next year from this revenue growth."

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About Open Orphan (www.openorphan.com)

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.