The first four of eight nominees in the International category of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year competition are profiled this week. The awards are run in association with Julius Baer, Enterprise Ireland, Invest NI, The Irish Times and Newstalk. The nominees will vie for the title of EY Entrepreneur of the Year at an awards ceremony later this year.
Cathal Friel, Open Orphan Plc
Serial entrepreneur Cathal Friel is the executive chairman and co-founder of Open Orphan, a pharmaceutical services company which was listed on the Dublin and London stock exchanges in 2019. Friel has had a long-running and successful history in business.
At 16, he had to abruptly leave school to rescue his ill father’s troubled business. He then went on to complete his education through night classes and got an MBA from the University of Ulster in 1990.
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).