ORPH.L Regulatory News (ORPH)

3 February 2021

Open Orphan plc

("Open Orphan" or the "Company")

Exercise of Investor Warrants by Investors and Issue of Shares

Total Voting Rights

Open Orphan plc (AIM: ORPH), a rapidly growing specialist pharmaceutical services clinical research organization (CRO) and a world leader in vaccine and antiviral testing using human challenge clinical trials, has received notice of exercise of warrants by investors who participated in the Venn loan note financing in December 2018 over 1,349,349 ordinary shares of 0.1 pence each in the capital of the Company ("Ordinary Shares") at a price of 0.1 pence per share for 477,703 Ordinary Shares and at a price of 2.2 pence per share for 871,646 Ordinary Shares. The gross proceeds of this exercise received by the Company amounts to £19,653.91.

Following this exercise the warrants issued in connection with the 2018 Venn loan note have been substantially exercised with 1,062,111 warrants outstanding. In addition, the 2018 Venn loan note has now been fully repaid, and as such, the current outstanding debt and loans owed by the Company is £319,000.

The total outstanding warrants over Ordinary Shares are as follows:

The Company has made application for 1,349,349 new Ordinary Shares, to be issued and allotted as a result of the warrant exercise set out above, to be admitted to trading on AIM and Euronext Growth. Admission is expected to occur at 8.00 a.m. on 8 February 2021.

Total Voting Rights

Following the admission of 1,349,349 new Ordinary Shares, the Company's total issued ordinary share capital will consist of 669,401,610 Ordinary Shares. This figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change to their interest in, the Company under the Financial Conduct Authority's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

Interested in becoming a volunteer?

hVIVO recruits many of its volunteers for its challenge study clinical trials through its dedicated volunteer recruitment website, www.flucamp.com. By volunteering to take part in one of our studies in a safe, controlled, clinical environment under expertly supervised conditions you are playing your part to further medical research and help increase the understanding of respiratory illnesses.

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.

For further information please contact:

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 volunteers 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. 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.