Dublin-listed pharmaceutical services company Open Orphan has announced that its subsidiary hVivo has signed a £3 million contract to develop a “challenge virus” based on new emerging variants of Covid-19. The contract is with Imperial College London as part of a Wellcome Trust-funded initiative to manufacture a SARS-CoV-2 challenge virus. In virus challenge studies, healthy volunteers are administered a pathogenic or virulent strain of virus. The company has two decades of experience in the field across a range of respiratory viruses including various strains of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, common cold virus as well as, more recently, the initial circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus. These challenge agents are then used in controlled human infection studies, an area that hVivo has focused on since 2001.

Source: The Irish Times May 10, 2021 06:39 UTC