In the UK, one of the centres leading the fight is FluCamp, a 24-bed privately run unit based in Whitechapel, East London, where for the past 30 years scientists have been carrying out research on cold and flu viruses.
It is the only research facility of its kind in Europe — and one of just four in the world — equipped to quarantine patients for weeks at a time while they are exposed to highly infectious viruses.
Professor John Oxford, an expert in virology at Queen Mary, University of London and scientific adviser to hVivo — the company that runs FluCamp — says the selection process will begin in the next few weeks. ‘The plan is to test hundreds of patients but do 24 at a time, as that is how many beds the unit has,’ he says.
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).