Open Orphan renews contract with top-3 pharma client

Pharmaceutical services contract research organisation Open Orphan announced a contract renewal on Tuesday, extending its consultancy services with an unnamed “major top-three global” pharmaceutical client to December 2021.

The AIM-traded firm said that, through the Venn Life Sciences team in the Breda office in the Netherlands, Open Orphan was providing independent chemistry, manufacturing and control (CMC) consultancy services to the client, and had done so since 2012.

It said Venn's CMC consultancy team provided essential support for two of the client's vaccine development programmes, with those collaborations extended until the end of 2021.

“This contract renewal underpins our confidence in delivering against ambitious growth targets for 2021 and securing strong revenue visibility moving forward,” said executive chairman Cathal Friel.

“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.”

Friel noted that market consensus was forecasting a “significant increase” in revenues for 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.”

At 1446 GMT, shares in Open Orphan were up 0.83% at 22.99p.