Open Orphan #ORPH – Venn Life Sciences New Contract Win

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 Open Orphan’s Paris subsidiary Venn Life Sciences (“Venn”) has secured an important new contract to support a major European pharmaceutical company.

The Paris team of Venn will be assisting a prospective, multicentre, longitudinal, non-interventional oncology study which is expected to enrol over 750 subjects whereby Venn will handle all data management, statistics and medical writing for the study.

This contract reinforces Venn’s position as one of the leading providers of data-management, statistics and medical writing services to many of Europe’s leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies, a service the Company has a strong track record or providing.

Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said:

“Venn Life Sciences Holdings plc which is now part of Open Orphan plc acquired Cardinal Systems in Paris in 2014. Cardinal had a history dating back to 1996 of providing high-quality data-management, statistics and randomisation services to many of Europe’s leading pharmaceutical companies in particular with a focus in the French pharma and biotech sector. In the past year since Open Orphan acquired Venn, we have substantially rationalised and restructured the Paris based team who are now incentivised to grow the business going forward with a strong focus on the original Cardinal Systems’ core skills in biometry including data management, statistics, and medical writing. Since our acquisition of hVIVO in January, our Venn team in Paris are also providing biometry services to hVIVO as part of their challenge study contracts and thereby improving the overall margin of challenge study delivery. Previously, hVIVO outsourced required biometry services to a third party.

This industry leading team in our Paris office has the knowledge and track record which has allowed us to continue to grow the business by winning large, long-term contracts such as the one we have announced today. We look forward to delivering on the contract and continuing to support large pharmaceutical companies as we rapidly grow Open Orphan.”

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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.