Ireland was placed sixth last week in a list of nations ranked on their response to the Covid-19 crisis in terms of innovation. The league table was compiled by StartupBlink, a Swiss-Israeli company that collates data on start-ups; the United Nations-backed Health Innovation Index; the Moscow Agency of Innovations; and partners such as tech database provider Crunchbase.
While the Republic has punched above its weight largely because of multi- national medical device firms, Enterprise Ireland says more than 100 of its client companies are responding to the crisis. Here, we step inside four Irish businesses that are seeking to make a material contribution in the fight against the deadly spread of Covid-19.
Open Orphan
Cathal Friel, the chairman of Open Orphan, calls hVivo his “lucky acquisition”. HVivo specialises in viral study models and testing the efficacy of vaccines. The company owns a 24-bedroom quarantine clinic in London.
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).