Vox22 May 2020 15:13
Cathal Friel, Executive Chairman of Open Orphan, said:
“Open Orphan is now a fast growing, and soon to be profitable, specialist CRO pharmaceutical services business with a market leading position in the rapidly expanding market of testing vaccines and antivirals. We are delighted by the heavily oversubscribed fundraise which has brought many new leading blue-chip institutional shareholders to our share register.
As a result of Covid-19, we are seeing unprecedented growth opportunities as pharma, biotech and governments around the world focus funding on finding solutions to Covid-19 and other respiratory diseases. As such, we’re developing several new revenue streams including by speeding up the development of both a seasonal coronavirus and a Covid-19 virus challenge study model to capitalise upon the Company’s inbound demand from Covid-19 vaccine developers globally. We have also opened up our laboratory services offering to third party pharma and biotech companies, as in the case of the recently announced Nearmedic contract, and from our state-of-the-art viral laboratory have launched a transformational Covid-19 antibody testing service which, unlike the home and online testing kits, offers 100% accuracy and the potential to complete up to 3,000 tests per day on a single machine. We believe that the Company has the pipeline to potentially sign up to six Covid-19 related challenge study contracts in 2020 with a further six potential contracts in 2021.
It is an exciting time at Open Orphan, and we are looking to capitalise on the opportunity to deliver rapid growth in the near term by converting some of our c. £160m pipeline of revenue opportunities.”