Venn Life Sciences: Open Orphan secures long-term contract to support European pharma company

Dublin-listed pharmaceutical services company Open Orphan has secured a long-term contract to support a major European pharmaceutical company.The contract win with the unnamed company comes through Open Orphan's Paris subsidiary Venn Life Sciences, and will handle all data management, statistics and medical writing for a prospective, multicentre, longitudinal, non-interventional oncology study which is expected to enrol over 750 subjects.Venn Life Sciences acquired Paris-based Cardinal Systems in 2014. The French company has provided data-management, statistics and randomisation services to Europe's pharmaceutical companies since 1996. Since Open Orphan's acquisition of hVivo in January, the Paris team Venn has also provided biometry services to hVivo as part of their challenge study contracts."In the past year since Open Orphan acquired Venn, we have substantially rationalised and restructured the Paris based team who are now incentivised to grow the business going forward with a strong focus on the original Cardinal Systems' core skills in biometry including data management, statistics, and medical writing," said Open Orphan chairman Cathal Friel."This industry leading team in our Paris office has the knowledge and track record which has allowed us to continue to grow the business by winning large, long-term contracts such as the one we have announced today."Open Orphan is the result of Mr Friel reversing his pharma services business of the same name into Dublin-listed drug clinical trials manager Venn Life Sciences last year.