Pharmaceutical services company Open Orphan announced it had received approval from the MHRA on Monday and that it was ready to conduct a phase one study of Covi-Vac, the COVID-19 nasal vaccine, in collaboration with US biotech Codgenix. Open Orphan’s subsidiary, hVIVO, will evaluate safety and immunogenicity of single-dose nasal vaccine candidate in 48 healthy young adult volunteers in its facility in Whitechapel, London.
Executive chairman of Open Orphan, Cathal Friel, told Sky News: “It’s phase one, however as we’ve seen phase one can move to phase three in a matter of months in this new world of rapid vaccine development.”
Open Orphan (LON:ORPH) was founded in 2017, with the goal of rapidly building Europe’s leading pharma services company by a management team with extensive industry and financial expertise. The company comprises of two commercial specialist CRO services businesses (Venn Life Sciences and hVIVO) and is also developing a genomics data platform business (Genomic Health Data).