Open Orphan PLC - Venn Life Sciences contract wins

7^th December 2020

Open Orphan plc

("Open Orphan" or the "Company")

Venn Life Sciences contract wins

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 its subsidiary Venn Life Sciences ("Venn") has been awarded two new contracts.

The first contract, which will commence immediately, is a COVID-19 study for a European pharmaceutical company which involves 200 patients in 50 sites across 5 countries around the world. Venn's Paris team will manage the randomisation and supply management for this randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 Clinical Trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a combination treatment of two drugs, and the best supportive care for patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in a hospitalised setting.

Venn's team based in the Breda office, in the Netherlands has also signed a contract with a European pharmaceutical company. The contract will see Venn assist with project management, design and implementation of new processes related to clinical development and use its expertise to deliver process improvement. The contract, which starts immediately, will run until December 2021 delivering significant revenues for Venn.

This contract builds on Venn's existing relationship with this European pharmaceutical company whom Venn currently provides a variety of services to including IMPD writing, regulatory briefing book writing, preclinical and clinical consultancy.

Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman, Open Orphan, said:

"As we come towards the end of 2020, it's wonderful to see all the elements of the Open Orphan business are delivering substantial revenues and both new contract wins and renewal of existing long-term customer contracts. The merger and integration of Open Orphan, Venn and hVIVO is very much now complete, and having become profitable in Q4 2020, we now have a very valuable, fast growing and secure business on our hands. Both Venn and hVIVO are converting their substantial pipeline of work whilst providing a high-quality service to their customers. The Paris team's contract is a further demonstration of our work in the fight against COVID-19 and the contract win by our Dutch Breda team shows how we continue to generate repeat business through our expertise.

I am very excited by the momentum in the business and look forward to providing further updates in the weeks and months ahead of what is going to be a very exciting 2021".

ENDS

Interested in becoming a volunteer?

If you are interested in being contacted and provided with details about future COVID-19 human challenge study research, please leave your contact details at www.UKCovidChallenge.com.

hVIVO recruits many of its volunteers for its challenge study clinical trials through its dedicated volunteer recruitment website, www.flucamp.com. hVIVO welcomes volunteers to take part in our clinical trials under expertly supervised conditions, to further medical research, and help us to take the understanding of respiratory illnesses to a new level. Volunteers are central to the work that we do; our studies focus on testing new treatments on real people, in a safe, controlled, clinical environment.

 Further details on all aspects of our volunteer programs including testimonials from previous volunteers can be found at www.flucamp.com.

For further information please contact

Notes to Editors - Open Orphan:

Open Orphan is a rapidly growing niche CRO pharmaceutical services company which is the 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 lab, 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.