Hvivo (LSE:HVO) — Update upon entering a decade of exponential vaccine development

0:00 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Open Orphan Investor Presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your question in the box below and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via your Investor Meet company dashboard. I'd also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. We begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. We would be very grateful you could simply click yes, no, or indeed do it later. That would be very kind of you.

0:47 I'd now like to hand over to Carl Hill, the Executive Chairman of Open Orphan PLC. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, and thank you very much for having me on.

0:59 The floor is now yours. Thank you very much. Okay. What I'd like to do is bring everybody through about fifteen, twenty minutes of the slides. I think a lot of people already know the open orphan story, and then allow plenty of time there. And they're already seeing there's a lot of questions. So but for those who are new to the story, who are we? We're open orphan PLC. Let me take a quick snapshot. Basically, we've had a very experienced management team with a strong operational track record. And what we've done, this is my second life science company. My first one was Amrit Pharma. Myself and my colleague, Ian O'Connell, set that up five, six five and a half years ago. We've been in a very professional management team. We stepped aside, and Amrit did a 150,000,000 in revenues last year, so it's been pretty successful. It's also got 250,000,000 in bonds, so it's it's a it's about a 500,000,000 EV company.

1:57 Again, that was done on the same basis. It picked up two distressed companies, turned them around, and fixed them. Picked up a third one, actually. So the open office plan was to pick up some distressed services company because Amrit itself is very much a drug development company, which is high risk, high reward. We thought we'd win this time and develop the company much lower risk, but hopefully equally a higher reward by focusing on pharma services and basically create a niche CRO. What's a CRO? That's a contract research organization. We get contract by large pharma to do the research that we have. So we get paid regardless for the trials, a success or a failure. Our specialism is really taking out costs, but really important. There's no good being a cost cutter. We leave that to the PE. We've gotta grow these businesses. So, really, we took over Venn.

2:49 Historically, Venn never made profits in ten years. We took over HVIVO. Again, never ever made a profit. HVIVO had a 113,000,000 invested in two or years before we took it over. And we think we put the two together, and we've got a a really, really good niche zero that's now the world leader in the testing of vaccines and antivirals. How we've done it? We have two CEOs, one in them, one in HVIVO, two COOs, two CFOs. That's six people, And each one of had a lovely little PA. That was 12. We got rid of them all. We believed we didn't believe anyone were doing their proper job. We replaced 12 of them by myself and my colleague, Leo Toole. That took 2,500,000 off the balance sheet and off the overheads.

3:35 And we're very transparent with the w w w open offer investor presentations forward slash cover governments. I've made all board members' salaries are there public. Myself and Lee were about 140,000 starting per year basic. We both have about a 20% annualized bonus subject to quite steep performance criteria, and Leo, on top of that, has a small pension contribution with absolutely nothing else. No warrants, no options, no shares, no gym clubs, no life insurance, and that's it. I think that's we're very happy. We think for her role, we're well paid. By the same, we we saved almost well in excess of 2,000,000 by removing the other packages. The real people who run these companies for us, and that's the the true heroes of them are the people within the company. Andrew was in HVIVO fourteen years. We've made him chief scientific officer.

4:25 Martin Johnson, many long years there. He left. We got him back early this year, chief medical officer. Adam French, again, quite a few years, 2014. So we've reached into each of the companies as we removed the the fat at the top who were hand pushers in my book. We've made the real hard workers run the company. And more importantly, it's very clear what salary we're on, and we all know small companies and pharma services companies and pharma companies. Packages might just get totally out of hand. So anybody earning in excess of 140,000, it's it's dangerous territory because we're having we fired a lot of people with c suites, and it's a great way of cutting reality check across the company. Look. Don't be going looking for crazy salaries because the boss' salary is very public.

5:14 So why are we? We're the world leader in testing the vaccines and antivirals using what's called a human challenge study clinical trial. That's just two a or a two b. We're a niche business. We've got a wonderful British government contract in recent weeks. We'll talk about that. We're substantial and rapidly growing, not alone order book, but contracts. We have a very broad customer base. We're now profitable, and we have several new revenue streams, and we're a very high margin business. The reason we're high margin is we're the world leader, and that's a small niche. It's a very profitable world leader. The last thing you should be doing is selling some of the low margins. Not gonna bore people with this. We put two companies together. HVIVO will be around long time and then SaaS. But look at the customer base we have. We virtually every one of the large vaccine manufacturers in the world.

6:03 So I know our names is orphan orphan drugs. The reality is we've morphed into vaccine. Vaccine. We're really a vaccine testing, vaccine trial company, and we've entered an era of exponential vaccine development with twenty years of monster sums of money being spent developing oncology as cancer treatments. Ten, fifteen years of huge sums been spent on basically developing gene therapy, and virtually nothing. For thirty years, there's been nothing spent on vaccines. Here comes the pandemic, and governments and pharma companies around the world realize they've got thirty years of catching up on developing new vaccines. And our sole role is to be the tester of all of these. Yes. There's been a COVID bubble, and, yes, we've got a balance with COVID. But in the past week, you've seen it separated demand from the boys. Anybody who got a balance had no revenues or anybody who got a balance that's solely dependent on COVID testing and COVID has got an awful thud reality check. We're very lucky. We're 90% non COVID, over a 100% vaccine. So we see ourselves having an awful lot of vaccine development work for the next ten years. We're ideally positioned front and central. So that's the difference of where we are.

7:22 This, I'm very proud of. People can say, Kyle, are you really sure you're profitable? You took over two companies, one in June last year and one in end of January and February this year. How can we ensure you're profitable? Well, just look at the cash. Cash as of a couple weeks ago, our balance sheet, 21,500,000, and we're virtually no debt, 1.3. That goes to prove to the market. We said we're now operational and profitable in q four. We could have been profitable in q three, but we took a little bit of a risk. We invested, and we did a lot of work on the COVID nineteen clinical trials this summer because we knew if the government didn't sign up, we have a dozen pharma companies. So that money is now flowing in. We raised 12 month million in the of May for two massively loss making companies. We didn't have much money in the bank. So if you look in the left hand side, cash in the bank now, 21,500,000 and growing. That's in excess of our market cap this time last year.

8:19 There's not much more to say there. Market cap about 150,160,000,000. So yeah. So it's good to have that now. We're clearly and that is really important in this COVID bubble. If you don't have profits, you don't have revenues, and I think there's an even bigger shift out coming. But for us, we've got revenues. We've got profits. I'd say we've a broad business way beyond COVID, but very much, we'd say we're the master of the vaccine testing space. What we've done, we put these companies together very quickly, and, look, we've constant news flow. But the beauty with the constant news flow, it's large deals. And the latest one, we didn't even get it in here, was last week. We we do challenge studies as a form of clinical trials, and we're the world experts of that.

9:06 For the last couple of months, we've announced a lot of RSV as minus one size virus. It's the greatest killer of children 12 in the world, believe it or not. There's lots of work to find the vaccine. We've signed three or four of those. They're all between 3,500,000, and we've not pushed the price up to 5,000,000 for those given that the people are not. But just last week, we also signed an influenza study, which we haven't done in five years, and we have another five or six of those coming. So that'll tell you, wow. It's not just RSV. It's not just COVID clinical trials that we're doing, but there's now a whole host of. The next one we hope to do is malaria, testing malaria vaccines, and then pneumococcus vaccines. So there's a whole range of vaccines we will be able to test and trial. Old HVIVO used to have one specialist for a couple of years, get bored, run out of work. So we're gonna certainly not get bored, and we've got tons of work coming down the track.

10:03 Some people want to know about the our British government contract. Literally, well, it's the first time in our life to kinda, let's say, for want of a better word, would have done play the significance of this contract. We didn't want people going mad. Look. We are conscious with a rapidly growing share price. I've always said we don't want something bouncing through the roof and then bouncing back down. Our model and the share price is trying to guide and gently notice the market along with our progress, and raise the share price about 50% every six months. And how are we doing that? It's doing good deals, profitable deals, and growing the business. So the human challenge model, the British government contract as of two weeks ago, it was an actual fact of 40,000,000, and that was if you read the RNS properly. It's initially it what it said, it was a 10,000,000 contract starting immediately. We've been actually working on for three or four months. And on that contract, 2,500,000 cash upfront is the deposit, and the rest of the 7.5 will come in, if you know, in about February or March.

11:03 On the same announcement, it said we got 7,500,000 in nonrefundable deposits for three more, COVID vaccine trials. Each of those trials are about 10,000,000. So put the sums together. We have three more contracts, 2,500,000 each, 25% plus. That's another 30,000,000 worth. That that's a quite a nice piece of work. Now that is very much front and center of COVID. With the Pfizer vaccine this week, which is fantastic news for us, for the world. It did cause a bit of a global global COVID bubble, not necessarily to pop, but to slow up somewhat. But from our perspective, we think it's wonderful news. We need this vaccine. There's more. Moderna, hopefully, will be out in the next couple of weeks, followed slow and quickly thereafter by the Oxford or the Cambridge Oxford.

11:51 Keep mixing to it above. GSK one. And then I think every month, if you've done summertime, there'll be another one approved. Most of these vaccines will be under emergency authorization, which means it'll be for the old, the elderly, the sick, the infirm, the doctors, and nurses, I e, the same people who took the annual flu jab. So going forward next summer, I think governments will say, those who take the flu jab should now take your annual COVID jab. And annual being very important. Most of the new COVID vaccines will last for about a year. So that means there are going to be a second wave of them, and we're already starting work on testing the second wave, which will maybe give you two or three years efficacy. And then there's another series testing one COVID vaccine against the other. They're called head tested.

12:39 So there's still a lot of work to do testing COVID vaccines. COVID is not gonna weigh anytime soon, but there's a lot of solutions to it. But along the way, we also find a huge balance saying there's enough that more vaccines under them. Pfizer signed an RSV vaccine study with us six weeks ago. This summer, Pfizer announced three phase three, one of being that RSV study, second one being COVID, and third being pneumococcus. That is three vaccines Pfizer's developing to phase three. That's more vaccines Pfizer announced this summer than the previous ten years. So that's what I'm saying. We're entering the decade of ten years of exceptional development of vaccines, and it's a fabulous place. We wanna stay specialized. We don't wanna go wild.

13:27 We're not gonna do any more acquisitions. We wanna sweat these assets and keep growing the business and take no substantial risks. And, of course, that challenge studies, you can go to website. All of this is on www.openorphan/investorspresentations. That's really how a challenge study works. More details on the challenge study. Our laboratory service and testing capability, another area, the former management team spent no time developing, and that's nearly we're now growing at very substantial revenues, and that's contributed to us to being a very nice profitable center to the business. Really exciting piece. There's, again, some friends said acquiring HVIVO is probably the most exciting deal and luckiest deal I've ever do. Bear in mind, when we acquired HVIVO in January, it was pretty close to being bust.

14:20 We ended up having to pay the payroll in February and March. HVIVO wasn't gonna pay their own payroll. That's how tied to our cash. And even worse, when we got in, their clinic was empty, and they had no projects, nothing for February, March, April. The first thing I did, I pick up the spin. We know there was a major plan talking to them, and we cut a deal, and that was with MapScience and UCAP. And every month since then, big part of my job is closing deals and making sure they get increasingly better. So even though I'm an executive chairman, which really means I'm the CEO, I'm also head of business development, and that's critical aspect. We're a pharma services company. We're not closing deals. We're not doing our job. But along the way, we've also we've also said we're very interested in data.

15:08 The original open orphan models, we were gonna build a genomic health database that was basically very much data driven. However, HVIVO already has the world's largest database of infectious disease progression data. They never monetized it, but give the former money to it. They didn't preserve it. They have it. And all we've done, we've taken that data, and really what that data involves, what happens to your body when you test and we infect a human body with a virus. That's how we test our drugs. We we actually and for the two weeks for the volunteers, and we know everything is happening, that body when it's in. So for instance, our new COVID trial going forward, we're putting wearables on all our volunteers, so we not alone know it by the hour. Up to this, we had the hourly data. We'll have by the minute.

15:58 And the data we collect is blood oxygen, RV time, heartbeat, body temperature, and movement. What does the new Apple Watch do? It has a blood oxygen meter. Oxy meter. It's better known. It's a heartbeat monitor, a core body temperature monitor, and the movement. So we can tell if we marry a wearable, a smartwatch, with our data. No. They the current watches take all these things, but they can't tell you very much. And this is your temperature. This is your blood oxygen. However, with our twenty years of trials, and particularly now with a new COVID trial, we're able to tell if we know their blood oxygen, their heartbeat, their core temperature, and their movement. Have you it'll tell you go beep, beep, beep. Have you influenza?

16:45 No. Beep, beep. Use the common cold, which is probably RSV. Beep, beep, beep, give RSV. So they'll tell you, go to your pharmacist, go to your doctor, or when we complete this COVID trial with wearables, it'll go beep beep beep. No. Get to hospital. You potentially have COVID. So those biomarkers, that's an inner database when married with the appropriate watch wearables can give the owner a phenomenal indication of what's wrong with them. Won't tell me exactly, but it can be good. So, look, that's rather exciting. We're it's clear we've got to be talking to most of the big wearable companies in the world at the moment. This is really important. That's all happened with both companies. They never reached a breakeven point.

17:31 You don't go to where you could take it out. We're well past our breakeven points, which is pretty exciting. And none of these companies, we've put them together as one, will ever make losses again. And the pharma services company should not be making losses.

17:47 Current trading, I'll point to that. With regular weekly, monthly announcements on new deal flows, that and that is very healthy. This pipeline, people kinda laughed at it, but we're pretty much working our way through it. So I think we're in a very comfortable position as regards pipeline. We have a fabulous pipeline. The only problem was the previous management team in HVO just didn't seem to be particularly good at closing out deals.

18:17 The beauty of it doing controversial and exciting deals is that today, HVIVO we pushed the HVIVO brand because it's known by vaccine companies around the world, but it's been in, our announcement with the British government three weeks ago was picked up. It was published in 4,600 articles around the world. It was done in 56 TV companies, and it just was unlimited that they meet. So, basically, we've got a huge high profile within our vaccine core customers. We've also wwflucamp.com. So if any of these want to be a volunteer in one of our trials from COVID to RSV to influenza and to get two weeks in quarantine with very good food, peace and quiet, unlimited access to TV, video, Internet, iPhones.

19:06 The only thing you can't do is lay the room, and the only other requirement, you can't take alcohol. And you get paid 3,500. You register on flu camp and become part of the the campaign to solve some of the virus problems. So in conclusion, we're basically a niche clinical research organization. We're very fast growing, and we're profitable. That's a nice space. We're the world leader in the test of vaccines. As such, we have a very high profit margin offering. We have a very broad customer base. It includes basically most of the global pharma companies, Pfizer, GSK, you name it. Their customers either very recently or in the past or currently. Huge growth opportunities as we enter a new decade, and we believe our enormous investment in both COVID, but really importantly, COVID, we all know, by next summer, it will be dwindling and going away, and it'll be a bad memory, particularly the vaccines. But COVID itself will never go away.

20:04 We firmly believe COVID will like influenza. Coronaviruses have been with us for hundreds of years. OC '43, 02/29, there's six of them. Now we have a seven. So but we learn to live with them. There'll be medication, and that will be life. But it it creates short term opportunities, but it creates huge long term opportunity. The government now must develop a whole host of vaccines. So when the next pandemic arrives, we have vaccines. The problem with COVID we've nothing that even came close to, what could cure it. Major contract, that was really validation what we were doing with UK government up to potentially 40,000,000, and we have about 10, not one, two, three, vaccine companies who will also sign the same 10,000,000 style contracts for a COVID trial.

20:55 With an extensive pipeline of vaccine companies, looking at conventional human studies trials, four to five, and then our COVID trials are eight to 10. We've are now for the first time ever. Our QMB facility is booked out almost two years in advance. The government contracts, the COVID trials, are done in the second facility. Our our main facility is a 24 bed, and the new facility is a Royal Free Hospital in North London infectious Disease where we've access to 19 beds. And we're actively looking at a third facility, and that's where the real leverage of our business, we can run multi site with more or less core original staff. So that's kind of our direction of travel. The last thing I wanna cover, we'll wrap up over to q and a, is the non core assets.

21:43 With two particularly non core assets, the main one's Immutex. It's got a a phase three ready universal flu vaccine, and it's got a phase two ready universal mosquito vaccine. There had been a competitor product called BionVax listed in Nasdaq, It brought up to about 500,000,000 market cap in recent months. It failed. This is the reason I don't like developing pharma products. I much prefer because half of my life savings tied up in this company, I much prefer to be in the pharma services, high profit, high reward, minimal downside. If any of our customer trials fail, it doesn't affect us. However, we do these noncore assets. Our our friend, Neil Woodford, bequest them to the company. He gave them a 113, and some of the money is wasted so much here. So we look we made it very clear.

22:28 This Hemutex asset is noncore. We've given ourselves six months. I think we're about three months into that. So there's three or four months left. The clock is ticking, folks, find a home, either sell it for cash or reverse it into a Nasdaq SPAC. So that's what's that space. I'm very conscious the clock is ticking. There's nothing like having time frame and a deadline to hit, and trust us, we're getting there. We also have Prep Pharma. It's a much smaller noncore asset. And, clock is ticking beyond 62%, and we'll so the one that can really move the dial for us is the immunohex. Regardless what we get for anyone, it'll be paid out if we sell them for cash, a pure dividend, or a share buyback or some way of getting the directly back. If it's a stake in the Nasdaq company, could be dividend species.

23:14 So people who own open orphan will now

23:16 hold a share in both open orphan and equally a share and, hopefully, a Nasdaq listed vehicle as well. So without further ado, that kind of brings us to q and a, and I'm just looking for a list. That's brilliant. Carjo, let me just give you a few moments just to review those. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the q and a tab

23:47 I'd also like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A, can be accessed via your Investor Meet company dashboard. I'd also like to remind you that your feedback is important to the company. And immediately after the presentation has ended, you'll be redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the company can better understand your views and expectations. And we'd very much encourage you to do that if you could spare the time. Car Hill, obviously investors had the ability to pre submit questions and you received a considerable number and thank you to all of those investors that submitted those in. But I think what we've done here, we've kind of condensed them into four different areas and perhaps I could address these. And I know you've touched on these matters within the slides, but perhaps if you can just put some context around that, that would be great. Sure.

24:38 So the first question, please, could you provide some more specifics on your forward looking plans and strategy on monetizing OpenOrphan's data platform? Yeah. What we said there are quite simply, it's kinda one our designs on, we believe, going forward, a clinical trial company. If you look at IQVIA, IQVIA has a massively higher multiple, 30 times profits compared to other clinical trial companies. That's because IQVIA bought a data company seven, eight years ago when it was part of Quintiles, and IQVIA now has access to a lot of data in addition. So our belief is that we've got an option. We've got most of the big wearable companies looking and tech companies looking for access to our data. We do a one off deal on one, but more than likely, think the prudent thing would be basically do a whole series of deals if people want data. They want data disease progression.

25:32 Not many people in the world, other than ourselves, actually make people sick for a week or two, and we take them in. And we make them well again. We do it all in the luxury of a a quarantine unit, but that's a very unusual process we do. So big wearable companies want access to the data. The only way to get it is through us. So it's unlikely to one off deal. We could monetize that for years to come. So all I'm saying is watch that space. We're we're we're in discussions. We've told most of wearables. Make us an offer, and let's see how those offers come in. But I think the sensible way would be, we would do multiple deals with multiple wearable companies, and they keep coming back to the well for more data. Every time we do a clinical trial, we'll add more wearables. Influenza kicks off in a few months, and we'll be given fresh influenza data. Hopefully, that answers the question.

26:20 Yeah. Thank you very much indeed. The second question, given the Pfizer vaccine is ninety percent effective, how does this affect your business? Are you really ninety percent non COVID as you have said many times in the previous months? Yeah. Look. I'm glad you asked that question or some investor. Yeah. Look. Over the summer and up to recent weeks, I've got a bit of flaxic on your what are you saying? You're ninety percent non COVID. And being honest with you, that was some people are disappointed. We didn't go and do 40 or 50,000,000 in revenue in the antibody, PCR, and COVID testing. We took a Jesus decision. It was somewhere we're making good money out of the testing. We're working about the banking because the one thing is dead when there's a COVID vaccine is testing. So testing, I. E, this is testing in individuals, but clinical trial that test the vaccines will go on. So we are ninety percent. Most of our contracts are non COVID. But one thing, all of our contracts are around vaccines.

27:18 So if you don't believe we're entering a decade of vaccines, we firmly believe we do it. We think there's thirty years of catching up developing new vaccines. We're very exciting. So, yes, we I would say it's we're ninety percent non COVID. But, look, let's be honest, we've had a very good COVID bubble. See a question here on the same line I'll answer as well. Does that mean our COVID, challenge to the models are are no good? Absolutely not. They're more viable. We now have the large vaccine COVID ones asking us, right. We want you to do a challenge study using your model, but testing the the new vaccine, hypothetically, whatever the ones that are launched, with the next generation that's called head to head. So we see our COVID challenge study models being used for the next three, four, five years at least because, we don't believe COVID's gonna weigh anytime soon.

28:07 We just live to learn with it. Learn to live with it. Thank you. Next question is really over the, shareholder base, I guess. It reads, given the story surrounding open orphan and the buoyant prospects for the vaccine industry over the next ten years, are you surprised that no other institutional investors have become significant shareholders in the company outside Invesco? Yeah. That's a very good question. Invesco are the shareholders listed in our website and have been very supportive. However, we raised 12,000,000 at the end of May, and as most shareholders know, they've been very upset. Of that 12,000,000, 11.5 was purely institutions. We didn't want to be held ransom to a single institution, so we divided the 12,000,000 by 17 institutions.

28:55 So our market cap at that point in time was over 50, so no one of the shareholders that we brought on board got more than 2%, never mind three. So it's only if an institution goes over three do we have to declare it. And then you have to buy more. You tell the market. So we have a whole range. I think we have now 18 institutions. Quite a few institutions have picked up 400,000,500,000, £500,000 worth, but we've got good range of institutions. We took that 12,000,000. And at the moment, we've asked the brokers, we don't see any in selling any significant. The the persisting sellers is that we we can see clearly and reason we keep liquidity and enjoy doing events like this is that a lot of investors come in five p, others come in ten, twelve, 15. And we want to be unlike stocks, whereas Hotel California, you can buy the shares, You can check-in, but you can never check out. So what we really want to do is keep liquidity.

29:48 There there is never a problem buying the shares, but more importantly, you've never got a problem selling your shares. So, look, we don't have any institutions in the military who want to pop over the three percent, but institutions can buy £500,000 worth or £1,000,000 worth very easy, and it doesn't show. Do you have to buy the current share price? Almost £5,000,000 worth of shares, and we know what happened to our market cap and everybody. So, no, we're very happy where it is. People do think this institution sounds, but I think it's some private investors. We we watch the show register very carefully. We've access to every shareholder, no matter how big and small, and we haven't seen any substantial institution. Naturally, there is some institutions who would have come in with sharpest doubles or triples that do top slice and take some off. But then there's some of the institutions who've been topping up.

30:40 Perfect. Thank you. And the final kind of category of pre submitted questions was around the noncore. And I think you have definitely touched on it, but perhaps just a further bit of detail. Could you provide further details in relation to the planned IMUTEXAL and give us your opinion of their likely value or range of value? Again, look. We would be remiss. We couldn't value. Look. We acquired these assets that were sitting on our balance sheet at zero cost until recent months. Have to be careful. We we still ascribe a a small value to them. However, we did say I think some people are saying we should be done. I think we originally kicked off the process. We put it on our website. These were non core. That was about two or three months ago. We said, give us about six months. If you rush a deal, matter how you do it, it's about six. So I think we've got ourselves two, three more months to find a result, and we're we remain very optimistic.

31:33 And look. Being honest with you, I think most shareholders preference rather than selling them for a one off cash we'll be to reverse them into some form of a NASDAQ listed vehicle. And then as part of that, I think we bring our skills of share promotion driving the company. We wouldn't be driving the vehicle ourselves. We want a good vehicle with management team, but I think I would be very happy. I'm still, by far, the largest shareholder. I'm locked into open orphan for three years this last June, so another year and a half or two to go. I have no intentions of selling my shares for a long time. However, I'd be very happy if I had shares, party cards to an equivalent number of shares in Nasdaq vehicle, and then it gives more flexibility. And it means we can monetize those noncore assets. Thank you very much indeed, and and thank you to all the investors that took the time to pre submit questions to the company company ahead of today's events. And as we said, these will all be published along with the questions that we're now going to address that are coming during the meeting on your dashboard.

32:33 So Caro, if I could ask you to click on the Q and A tab, and this is where it gets all a little bit because you've got lots of questions probably talking about the same different topics, some of which you've covered through these pre submitted questions as well. So perhaps if I could just hand over to you, could I ask you to read out who the question is from, if you wish? And certainly, if you could certainly read the question, that would be great because no investor can see the questions that have come in during the live event. And I'll pick up once we get to the end. Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. Let me scroll down to and then, look, I want to end. I know I'm talking about thirty two minutes. It's a Friday evening. I'm pretty chill. I'm in a nice warm office, and I'm not rushing anywhere. But let me I know I'm conscious people don't want me dragged on to that. Let me let me scroll through some of them.

33:20 Quite a few of them, I think, in my presentation.

33:26 So there's three questions from about the Immutec sell off, how far down the road, like, we're well down the road to answer that. We said that we had six months. We're about three months in. Give us another three months, and we'll see where we are. We're increasingly confident. Something about you recruiting a lot of staff in Belgium, USA. I think some of these recruitment these recruitment sites, same recruitment. Look. We are recruiting a small amount of staff in London, but The USA is definitely wrong. That's that. And we're not recruiting in Belgium either. So I think we will not if we're gonna make a success in this business, we've gotta sweat the assets. We do not want to be recruiting too many more staff. Another question at after.

34:13 What is the timelines and process for a data sale to wearables look? That's work in progress, and we've made it clear to where it was making some offers. Over the next month or two or three, we'll be working our way through those. Wherever we're dealing with very large tens of tens of billions market caps. None of will just sign up for a deal tomorrow or next week, but that's well well underway and say, why is this space? We're we're the only people in the world that have that disease progression data. Because the uniqueness, our volunteers, we deliberately make them sick for a week or two. We make sure that they're very well when they go home. But in the process of making them sick, we collect a lot of data. So there's not many places in the world, a, to collect the data, and we're one of the few places in the world that actually does that.

34:59 Dave g asked, how are you protecting your data databases for data from hackers? Well, bear in mind, our regional database, Morris Tracy, one of our colleagues, set up a company called Genomic Medicine, Maryland, GMI. It was sold for 500,000 to Wuxi, which is a Chinese company. But along the way, they would have spent enough of money developing a data platform. We were very looking. The small tech team we built that built us the sub similar equipment one at a fraction that we paid for and built it before we did IPO. I go by my personal cash paid for that, and we believe we've got a a Rolls Royce database. It was only built in recent years that nothing is ever hacker proof, but it it's pretty good. The beauty about the data we have is that hackers don't generally come looking for it because who's gonna buy it? Big pharma or big tech. It's not like we hold we never hold credit cards. We don't hold things like that that may be of interest. The data we have, we'd have minimal to no interest to hackers because imagine turning up to one of large pharma companies or one of wearables on these dark websites saying, oh, we've got all this dodgy data.

36:11 Give us cash. Like, we know what the pharma companies detective call the cops. So, yeah, we're quite lucky. The data we have is generally not of interest to hackers. Hackers want financial data, which they can settle to other hackers who can do what hackers do. Scrolling down, JC. Hi, Kyle. Have you thought we'd taken off to Nasdaq as well as any techs? Yeah. Well, look, there's really good example. This is my third public company I've set up on none. Let's be honest. The first one I did was fast in oil and gas. We got it a 100,000,000. It wasn't a success. Hands up. I I made some errors. But oil oil and gas, we did the IPO in 2011. Oil price was over a $110 a barrel. Within eighteen months, oil prices collapsed below 40, so I folded our tent, saved the shareholders cash.

37:00 We didn't get a return and changed the name to Amrit Pharma. And today, remain one of larger shareholders than Amrit. I never sold a share. In fact, I bought more shares. But Amrit management team told me, oh, it's a bit like Martin and Talbot. One day, we'll be rich. So the Amrit showed our management and said, Kyle, wait. Wait. Once we go on Nasdaq, we'll be all rich. The share price will go up to 10 x. Funny enough, Amrit listed in that Nasdaq, and the share price has moved sideways. If any downside was, They used the management team used a picture with AIM. I actually love AIM. AIM is a wonderful market. If the management team do what they're supposed to do, keep cost down, run like hell, and it is the alternative investment market. That's the fast growth. So my belief, AIM was set up day one, get big fast, and graduate to the main board or get sold. So AIM is not for hanging around.

37:52 So AIM is more appropriate. NASDAQ is probably appropriate for our immun techs because, yeah, they like high risk, high rewards. I think it would be quite exciting if we can get Immutex into Nasdaq vehicle, but I think, open orphan has a very good home and aim and with a lot more to go. Let me scroll down. Yeah. Good question here. Always love these ones about data production. John g, read the sale of the data. Are there no data protection issues? No. That that's like, In regards to we're giving people access to our data. Bear in mind, we're running clinical trials. Everything we're doing, monthly consents, monthly approval is unbelievable. So we have every consent. There's absolutely no data protection issue. Because bear in mind, the type of data we're selling, we've got so much approvals to use it.

38:43 So that that doesn't cause us an issue. John g again. Are there further big contracts in the pipeline? Yeah. Look. We've got in the market. We we're constantly wanting to sign contracts. We've gotta be careful. We could sign a 100,000,000 of COVID nineteen vaccine trials at the moment. We've signed the equivalent of 40,000,000 with the British government. We wanted to get a little pause for a moment for a month or two. And so please don't be expecting huge contracts every week, every month because we need to work our way through them. We need to get the staff used to them. We need to get our third facility underway. And at the moment, we have a if you go back and count, we've had a lot of contracts underway. We're working our way through them, but, yeah, we could sign so many contracts. The worst thing we could do is sign too many contracts where we're coming almost we're playing a little bit hard to get with some of our customers. If you notice, our channel studies started out in March at 3,000,000.

39:39 We've now got them up to 4,500,000 for the same piece of work. So that's called inflation, which are margins for us. So, yeah, there is plenty more big contracts. I I repeat, we could sign in 10 COVID nine despite the vaccine coming. There's still companies need access to challenge studies to really see does it work, how effective it is, and more importantly, to want to test the next generation of COVID vaccines against the current one. So lots more big contracts, but let us work through some of the ones we have. And don't worry. One part about we'll we'll keep announcing you as well. Kevin b, is the company aware of persistent sellers are pressing the sharpest? Is this seller an institution seller? Does he plans to get a foreign industry? Look. We're always talking to institutions.

40:25 Institutions are hit crossing 3% because then they send a tier one. And then if it takes some profit, they go down below and their names up. So we've got plenty of institutions. We're not liberating it, but if somebody really does a company office deep dive, you'll find them and see them there. We've got a very large range. So we've got 16 institutions coming in May. Every one of them are still there. Some have top sliced a bit. Actually, less than I thought because they're top slicing more. But we have a lot of our own retail. We have a fabulous retail following, and I'm the first person to encourage retail to take profit, take some out, and encourage more retail coming in. So that, basically, we keep good, healthy flow of buyers and sellers. I know some days, some people think this institution is, believe it or not, some of our our investors who would have put a 100,000 in not this time last year, December, you could have bought a share price for 3.5. So that 100,000 is now worth 750,000.

41:22 We're thinking we could have bought shares Christmas week. The market panicked Christmas week. I made a mistake. I said I was stepping back, from being CEO of Open Orphan and getting Trevor Phillips to be the chief executive over Christmas week as part of taking a right to me when our share price collapsed from 5.5 p to 3.5 p. And we had a very urgently late December agenda. I well, hang on, folks. I didn't know that I'm gonna be executive chairman and a very hands on executive chairman. Usually, there's never room for a CEO and an executive chairman. Executive chairman is a fancy name for a CEO. In that fact, I'm also COO. So, yeah, look, I we don't we don't see any persistent large institution, but the people take profits. Yeah. Lovely question. Nathan Orr.

42:07 Can chimps, a challenge studies, be used to test antivirals due to the launch and development of the same way as we use to test vaccines? Would this further boost demand for chimps and quarantine facilities? Absolutely. Problem with HVIVO in the past, the reason I spend most of my time now in the HVIVO clinic, very hands on, or in the office in London, and that's Monday to Friday. And that's I'm told by a lot of staff, I spend more time on a weekly basis than maybe some former management team spent on an annualized basis, walking the floor, seeing what they're doing. But the really interesting part is that we're doing a great business at moment, testing vaccines, testing RSV, testing influenza, testing pneumococcus, hopefully testing, malaria vaccines.

42:53 But antivirals, when you're sick, vaccine stops you getting sick. But when you do get any particular thing, we saw our friend Trump. The first thing we gave him was antivirals. Yeah. So I look at our name. We're the world leader in the testing of vaccines and testing antivirals. So watch this space in there early in New York. There's a lot of business development coming through on the testing of antivirals, and we're trying to get a a lower cost way of running those trials so we can put them through. In the past, challenge studies, I can equate it to, it was almost like a first class airfare. It was very expensive and took a while. We want to bring challenge studies to an easyJet product. It's affordable, it's quick, it's fast, and it's profitable for all pharma companies. The problem in the past, not a lot of vaccine companies, not a lot of them did human Chinese because it took a long time, and there's only one proper center that was in our center in East London, Whitechapel. As of today, we've got two. We use them all free, and I'd hope early in New Year, we're gonna have a third, and that that might be interesting and useful. We're not gonna waste shareholder money buying one or leasing one, but there is an ability now. We're training the staff to run multi center, and that's where we get the real bang for the buck of next year. We can actually run three or maybe four with almost the same amount of staff.

44:16 Let me see. It's looking through the an awful lot of questions here. I'm just trying to find ones that I haven't touched upon. James f, when will the submission to the MHRA be done for COVID nineteen human SARS? What are your feelings being approved? We've been very careful. Part of the reason we could assign this is this 10 vaccine companies of varying size, shape ships, countries, regions, and continents. Bear in mind, not just North America, not just Europe. We've got a bunch of Asians looking for as well. And the reason we didn't roam with them initially, I think having the government as our launch customer certainly improves the chances of approval. However, at the moment, every clinical trial we do, every challenge study, we have to get a major approval. We've got the ethics approval.

45:07 So we work through that. We generally are not in the habit of making announcements when we ever get those approvals or we don't get. If it force, we don't succeed. We'll be asking again, and we didn't sign that contract with the British government for it to fail. We signed that the basis that we could see where it goes, but we would be optimistic. Let me scroll down. Anything else? Again, somebody asked about when we'll get the likely ethical and regulatory look. The the reality is we don't update the market, but we signed that influenza study last week. We're in the process. There is a certain number of days for ethical approval and for immature approval, so we don't go back to market and say when we have or haven't. If it's a a real game shifter, we would, but when we're dealing with regular bodies, they don't like feeling under pressure. Oh, when's it coming?

46:01 When's it coming? We'd like dealing with the right leader. And the company has a long history of doing with the regular ones. If we do with the regular ones, we generally will get approval. Justin, why? Why do COVID volunteers specifically need to wear wearables? Does HVIVO testing database capture blood oxygen? Absolutely. Temperature, movement, heartbeat. Volunteers won't have worn wearables for previous data. Yeah. That's where the real value in the company at the moment was. It's a huge value untapped. Your new Apple Watch has a blood oxygen meter, has a heartbeat, has a core body temperature movement. Take those four biomarkers. And if you have it in a challenge to you can almost tell, have you flu, common cold, RSV, RV, coronavirus, or COVID. So that's pretty interesting.

46:53 So that's where, for the first time ever, all our volunteers are wearing wearable. What is wearable? It's a patch in their arm here. It's a sticky patch with Wi Fi and Bluetooth on it. There's no cables to it. It's very simple. And from the minute they enter, two weeks later they we have every detail on those four or five biomarkers. So, yeah, that's and, again, that's what I'm saying. IQVIA is one of the world's most valuable zero, and it's on the highest, highest model. And that's because it has data, and it makes the data available but at a price. So we'd like to be having a significant price for our data. Let me just see any other ones. Yeah. I love this. With such an exciting pipeline existing orders, is there a risk that you won't be able to meet demand?

47:42 Hans, you're absolutely right. That's why we're taking a little bit of pause. We don't want people panicking between our Christmas. Oh, where's your next 4,000,000? Where's your next 10,000,000? We have signed a lot of orders. I don't don't underestimate the British government contract is a 40,000,000 contract. That's more than twice the revenues HVIVO ever did on a good year. The initial 10,000,000, we're well through it. It'll be done in full March, April time, and then we'll crack on with each of the 10,000,000. So we're saying there'll be no news flow. There will definitely be news flow, but let us work through the pipeline and say we can tomorrow morning, we could sign up 10 more COVID despite the Pfizer vaccine coming, which is wonderful news. There's still a huge appetite to test vaccine. Bear in mind, there's a 156 different COVID vaccines in development. And, also, BIRMA, our same COVID challenge study, which is is interesting, can be used to test antivirals as part of their earlier question. And at the moment, other than the Gilead redimisvir, there's very few 100 virals. There's room for five or 10 antivirals in the market for COVID. So I I think we're we're certainly entering a really exciting decade for antivirals and vaccine development.

48:56 Mike f, can you explain more about the recent patent that we regularly we see an opportunity. It's usually data oriented, biomarkers. We can capture biomarkers and provide we patent that's ours. The world doesn't realize Amazon, the single click is owned by Amazon. Nobody else in the world says, do you want to buy the single click that was patent by Amazon when they thought they were mad? So they're the only company in the world when you go to order something. If your credit card is preloaded, it says a single click can complete your order. So, yeah, you'll see us we we don't spend too much money in patents because we're not an IP company. But, yeah, you will see us occasionally finding low cost patents that kinda gives us more control on our data. E and J, why doesn't big pharma take you out?

49:43 It's just saying they're not talking to us, as I'd say. We're no mad rush, but there it does come an inflection point, but I think our company is still far from fully valued. And by the way, big pharma would never bias. It'd be big serial clinical research organizers, clinical trial companies, big pharma services. Big pharma wouldn't want because they're basically they have enough to do it. They have their own product. And that was a problem with the previous management team. You'd rather be good at providing services or good at product development. You can't do both. So big pharma are good at developing high risk, high reward products. We're good at developing the services, and there's a lot of big clinical trial services coming up. So James f, what's getting done in London or Wyoming and also Antwerp? Seems a lot of recruitment going on overseas for HVO. Yeah.

50:33 Look. There's a lot of recruitment companies, I think, copy and paste. Are absolutely looking for nobody in Lander, absolutely nobody in Wyoming, absolutely nobody in Antwerp. We are looking occasionally for a small amount of people in London, but, look, I would I sign off an hourly job. I usually fire more people than we hire because I just think we've got we've gone beyond the point of farming, taking the fat out. But, no, we are not hiring extensively at the moment, and there's no plans. We won't sweat this asset, and we're far from sweating it. Good question. Michael or for, say, a 4,000,000 RSV contract, is that allocated internally in HVIVO and VEN, or is it all HVIVO? Yeah. The average non COVID contract is about 4. We can squeeze it up to 5,000,000 as well. Influencers, quick and cheerful is 2.5 to 3,000,000.

51:24 But for those, the bulk of that goes to HVIVO. But for all clinical trials, there is a data management called the biometric, primarily biostats and data management between 510%. In the past, HVIVO didn't do that, so between 510% went out to door to a biometric company. Biometry is a very, very high margin business, very skilled to to kind of, let's say, mad scientists in it and data scientists, and we've got a great core group of those in the Paris office. We let most of their colleagues go, but it's funny the group we've left in Paris they've worked together as a team for over twenty years. They were called originally Cardinal Systems. So, yeah, instead of up to 10% of our revenue going out to a third party and losing that gross margin of at least fifty, sixty, 70%, that's not provided in a large part by our men team in bars. So that's pretty cool. So it's allocated 10% to that. So that's it.

52:23 Just scrolling down. There's a lot more. And, yes, good question, Look. We have I keep saying now to really scale HVIVO. Yeah. It's Cormick O. Hi, Thanks for presentation. What are the developments with the facility usage in The USA and Australia, please? Thanks, Cormick. Yep. The company for a long time had a single facility in Whitechapel. They spent a lot of money, 25,000,000 development. There is other quarantine units around the world. There's one other one in The United Kingdom. That's the Royal Free Hospital in North North London. We now have access to that one. It's got 19 beds. We'll see how long. I think we'll have it for quite a long period in time. It has been grossly underutilized. Most use was the nurse from Scotland who caught Ebola some years ago in West Africa.

53:10 It does get used. So we're doing most of our COVID work and the government work in there. However, there is one on the continent. Again, we nicked most of their staff. They used to be our largest competitor, so now they're no longer they don't have their staff. We hired seven of them through the CHIM agents. And, yeah, there'll be conversations about guys with your staff that work for us. They seem to like working for us. Can we use the facility you used to run? That's the kind of conversations going there. Mhmm. And there's one in North America, and there's one coming out of the ground in Australia. It's no use building these facilities. You have to have, a, the staff, b, the challenge agents, which the virus is used to infect the people, and then you need the challenge model. Let's characterize it. Then you need the standard operating procedures. Then you need the protocols.

53:55 It takes decades to build up a challenge study business. That's where we're quite unique. We think we're just the start of really building up so we can run multi center trials from our core staff and look. We do have to hire a few extra nurses, a few extra doctors, but the core core scientific staff, we can we can really leverage and all that. So, yeah, it would be nice to have something in North America and something in Australia in addition to something next to Europe. So let's say we're not going to waste shareholder money buying one, building one, or taking the big expensive leases, and we we wanna sweat the assets. Colin Kay, afternoon. I appreciate the ongoing short term goal to increase the share price by 50% every six months. What's the bigger picture long term target? Is it to become a billion dollar company, or do you think it could be acquired before long? Thanks, Colin.

54:49 Yeah. Look. My plan is at the moment, originally, we put these two massively loss making companies earlier this year so if we can fix them and sell them for $8,090,000,000,100,000,000, we'll be doing well. That's when our combined valuation was 30,000,000. So I was talking two or three times our market cap. We're now at a 150, so sure as hell we're not selling for a 100. I think we're at the moment. If we can keep growing the share price by 50%, keep liquidity, allow investors to come in as some investors make money, and I'd say some of the biggest people who are selling were people who bought shares Christmas week at 3.5 p when they sell 25 p. If you do the sums, it's pretty tempting not to top slice. And somebody put a 100,000 in a 3.5, suddenly has 750,000.

55:34 That's pretty well. So there you have somebody maybe selling $3.04,500,000 that looks and smells like an institution, but it's just a very, very lucky retail customer who came in early. So our plan is not to get distracted by looking for a sales process for the primary company. We will sell and monetize every non core asset. Everything gets sold. All those non core. Immutex gets sold, prep gets sold, and the data, we will monetize, sell it maybe slowly but surely. But the primary services business, we will keep growing. And if an offer comes in, we won't be backwards coming forward. But we don't want to have an obsession with selling the company. A, that upsets our wonderful staff. And b, if you press make build a great company, who knows what happens? But as long as we keep growing that share price by 50% every six months and keep liquidity, I think that's the best thing for you.

56:31 W yeah. David w. How will the HVIVO dataset be secured when the data is sold? And, also, how secure is it currently with China, North Korea, Russia? Hacking I you put it to say that hackers are after financial information and sell dollar hackers. I don't think we have much interest from North Koreans or Russians to cover data. I don't recall them developing much with extensive data products. If we're a financial services company, yeah, we put no. We do have hacking. We do have people. We have a very secure databases, but, no, that doesn't strike us as, China, North Korea, Russian. I we don't see I don't mean derogatory. I I've never seen hacked pharma data end up there or being monetized there so that that doesn't appear that's not a major concern. We watch carefully.

57:24 Okay. Brian c, seeing your attractive margins, how will you maintain buyers to any competitor entering your unique space next two years cybersecurity? Yeah. Look. We've great margins. Borrower to entry, I think I've covered it. You have to have the protocols. You have to have the SOPs. But really importantly, you have to have a suite of challenge study models. We acquired six Neil Woodford, and he spent 25,000,000 developing them. And it's not just time to develop a new virus. The only reason we could do the British government one, the COVID one, is because our team worked extensively three years on a seasonal coronavirus challenge study model. And funny enough, Andrew Catchpole, the fact big pharma laughed at him three years ago, said that he thought we should develop a COVID coronavirus challenge study model. So we will do that in record time in less than six months because it was three years work done some years earlier. So the bonus 10 feet is it takes a long time to build up that set. You have to have the facility, which is very expensive. On average, it's now 50,000,000 to do a 25 bed quarantine unit. But then you have to do the staff. You have to be able to manufacture the virus, characterize it, and then you have to have the challenge model. Then you have the SOP. So, yeah, it's a difficult market to get into. It takes time.

58:43 I'm just scrolling, maybe do just conscious of time I'm approaching the hour, I think I'm supposed to shut down within the hour. Let me see. Carl, absolutely no no worries. For every question you answer, there seems to be another two coming in. So I guess perhaps let's have a look to wrap up in the next couple of minutes or so, and then we can present all these questions after the event anyway. Exactly. Okay. Okay. How about we take one last this is the very last one on the screen, but I'll go and take one more. Hi, I just spoke one minute ago. Hot off the press. Oh, it's more. Are you actually talking to any other governments regarding any charges? Absolutely. North America, if you look at our website, we've actively worked for BARDA and DARPA. That's a defense research, so not the same one during the moment. And we've had work with, maybe not, Chinese regulators in the past and currently, and work with regulators in Australia, and work with regulators in quite a few European companies. So that's a good space. So that's so we we talk to governments everywhere.

59:46 One last question. Greg w, when will the decision be made in paying dividends? We sit at our IPO, which is eighteen months ago, within as soon as possible, pay a dividend. At the moment, 21,500,000, that gives us possibility to pay dividends. So let's see where the next six months go. Certainly, paying a dividend would not be a problem. Not on the cards for this year, but let's see next year as that cash grows. I said we will not be raising money again. Next process will be handing money back. So, yeah, dividend, we started that process. So what's that space? Nothing in the short term, but certainly, it's something for us all to look at carefully as we go into next year. I think, hopefully, that will maybe wrap things up at that point. That's brilliant. Thank you very much indeed, Carhoe.

1:00:38 And of course, for all those questions, as we said, we'll transcribe the responses. We'll have them available on the dashboard. And of course, if there's any supplementary ones, Carho, feel free to add to them at the appropriate time. Perhaps I could ask you just finally to wrap up. I know investor feedback is important to you, and we'll redirect investors to be able to provide that directly to you. Absolutely. Just absolutely. Look look to engage investors any stage, and that's why we want to try and be sorry. There is one last question. I might just squeeze in some important missed. Some investors asking, is a quarantine unit now fully booked on free time? Absolutely. On the sign of that influenza study last week. That's us for Christmas next year, and we're all free. So both facilities are full for eighteen months, hence, the requirement to find a third facility.

1:01:32 Okay. Well, on that note, I think we will conclude it there. So thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide the company your feedback. If you access this meeting via our website, the feedback page will appear. If you access this via the link sent you by email, you'll be simply asked to log in and provide your feedback to the company, and we'd very much encourage you to do that if you could spare a few moments late on a Friday evening. Therefore, on behalf of Carl Hill and the management team at Open Orphan PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's event. That now concludes the session. Have a very pleasant weekend, and thank you to all.