Human challenge studies provide more valuable information than animal challenge studies, which produce results that must be extrapolated in order to determine the impact on humans. They also allow for trials on a small participant pool that faces minimal risk of adverse outcomes, clinical complications or hospitalization. Finally, the small size of the trial reduces the financial risk of failure, as much less vaccine product is required for a human challenge trial than a Phase II clinical trial.
The effort to develop a vaccine to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a clear example of the importance of eliminating barriers to health care innovation.
In this environment, established commercial companies in the human challenges trial market, including hVIVO, can pioneer epidemic and pandemic disease modeling to accelerate the development of vaccines with proven efficacy. These firms can serve as valuable partners to the pharma and biotech industries by removing longstanding bottlenecks to innovation.
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).
