The daily toll of new infections. The number of hospitalisations. The numbers in ICU. The R-0 number. The cases per 100,000 people. For more than eight months now, almost every aspect of our lives has been dominated by daily, grim readings of the Covid-19 data.
And then, last Monday at 11.45am, a press release featuring a whole new set of numbers landed in news editors’ inboxes: 43,538 – the number of people enrolled in the trial for Pfizer and BioNTech’s BNT1 62b2 vaccine; 94 – the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 evaluated; 90 per cent – the vaccine’s estimated efficacy.
One of the intriguing next stages will involve human challenge trials – clinical trials in which healthy volunteers are exposed to Covid-19 in a controlled setting.
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).