Carol Dalton compares the process of getting a company ready for a stock market listing to working the extremely busy shifts she did as a hostess in Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at the Powerscourt Hotel in Wicklow, as a college student.
There’s so much involved,” she says of the listing of Poolbeg Pharma, which was recently spun out from Open Orphan. “It takes an awful lot of work, but half of me thinks it’s just like a busy dinner service.
"You’re just running, and as a team you all work together, and then suddenly it’s done – and you can feel the immediate success as you see happy faces walking out the door. It’s that same kind of adrenaline – but over about a three-month period.”
At just 29, Dalton, who hails from Kilternan, south Dublin, is a co-founder of both Open Orphan and Poolbeg Pharma, which are listed on London’s AIM, as well as being vice-president, investor relations for both firms.
It is an exciting time for both companies. They are right at the centre of medical developments which have become all the more important, due to Covid-19.
Open Orphan, which is led by well-known corporate figure Cathal Friel, joined the AIM in 2019 via a reverse takeover of listed clinical trials group Venn Life Sciences.
But its most fortuitous deal was a £30m reverse takeover of London-based hVivo – Europe’s only commercial 24-bed quarantine clinic and on-site virology laboratory capable of human challenge studies, where people volunteer to get infected in order to study vaccines and other medicines.
Completing in early 2020, the deal put Open Orphan right at the centre of Covid-19 research.
“hVivo has the world-leading portfolio of human challenge viruses – so we have influenza, RSV, HRV, asthma, COPD. We just launched malaria, and we’ve been developing a Covid-19 challenge model,” she says.
“Basically, we infect people intentionally in a very controlled, very safe place under monitoring for about two weeks to test our client’s vaccines or antivirals. They’re a great way for pharma companies to get really quick efficacy data,” she explains.
A full phase-two study could take a year to complete, and involves vaccinating hundreds of people – and then waiting for someone to catch the virus in question.
“But this way you have a set number of people down here, you know they’ve got the virus, you know how much of the virus they got – and you know whether or not your vaccine works within about six months.”
People are not paid for doing the study, but rather are “compensated for their time” – which translates into around £4,000 which includes two weeks at the facility plus follow-up tests and research. Tests can range from projects looking at the common cold, to more serious illnesses.
“People come in there who might have a dissertation to do, or they can come and work remotely – or maybe they just want to chill out and have two weeks of watching Netflix and playing video games,” says Dalton.
Soon after Open Orphan did the deal with hVivo, Covid-19 began to emerge as a global health issue.
“There had actually been a coronavirus challenge study model in development a couple of years previously (at hVivo), and it seemed that the pharma companies had no interest in it – so it was put in a cabinet somewhere and was never looked at again. But in early March 2020 we decided to bring these back up and start developing our coronavirus human challenge study model.
“We were suddenly inundated with phone calls from every news publication across the world.”
While vaccines have now been developed for Covid-19, hVivo is likely to be kept busy with the disease for some time.
"It may be a case that we’ll have Covid-19 vaccine annual jabs like we have the flu jab now. And like the flu jab, that needs to be changed every year,” says Dalton. “I don’t think it’s quite the end of it, unfortunately.”
Dalton grew up in Kilternan. Her mother is a solictor and her father owns the Dalton Food & Wine wholesalers. She attended St Gerard’s in Bray, developing a love for ballet and sports, which sparked an interest in nutrition. This in turn led her to go on to study nutraceuticals, which is the area of food products which provide medical or health benefits.
“I did my dissertation in college on antibiotic resistance to Pseudomonas bacteria, mostly focusing on cystic fibrosis patients.”
After college, she travelled for a couple of years through Central and South America, and on to Australia. On her return, she planned to seek laboratory work – but spent two weeks temping at Cathal Friel’s Raglan Capital.
At the time the company had just listed Amryt Pharma and was working on the next project. Raglan did not have a science person on their team, and Dalton was able to draw on some of her own training.
“They were working on spreadsheets and research, and I said: ‘Ah, sure I’ll give you a bit of a hand’ – and it turned out that I was actually a good bit of help.”
She finished her temping role and was offered a full-time position with the company, becoming an integral part of Friel’s team, along with Ian O’Connell, now CFO of Open Orphan.
“We did a lot of research into the disparity between rare disease products in the US versus those in Europe, and it soon became clear that there were far more rare disease products in the US than in Europe. That’s due to the difficult regulatory pathway in Europe, because you’re dealing with individual countries.”
That was when Dalkey-based Venn Life Sciences came on the radar, which was loss-making at the time. However its clinical trials businesses offered an opportunity to help niche drugs win approval in the EU.
Then hVivo came along. “It turned out to be the most timely acquisition. Two months later, Covid came around the corner – and here we were with this specialist virology lab, this world leader in testing vaccines and antivirals using human challenge studies. We were more than fortunate to find it at that time – because, compared to now, we got it for a song.”
The concept of human tests has proven to be somewhat controversial since the onset of Covid.
Dalton says it is a well-established practice.
“Human challenge has been going on for a very, very long time,” says Dalton. “The history of hVivo goes back to 1945 when the Common Cold Unit was set up at Salisbury.”
She adds that the company has an ethics committee which looks closely at all studies.
During the summer, Open Orphan spun out Poolbeg Pharma. The funds from the initial public offering will be used primarily to fund clinical trial costs associated with the development of their POLB 001 treatment for severe influenza, and also to acquire and develop a new portfolio.
Dalton says that hVivo has a number of assets, but that it did not want to compete with trial clients in the development of new drugs.
“We’d been looking at options to monetise each of these assets, and the first was our POLB asset. This was discovered using the human challenge data that hVivo had.
“We basically decided we needed to spin out these assets into a new company, so that they could be developed, have the funds to cover development, and have a team working on them.”
Recently Pfizer announced positive details of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV – a cold-like virus) human challenge study data with hVivo. “That’s really put us at the forefront and people are seeing how useful this data is.
“We have more non-core assets that we hope to monetise in the relatively near term. Basically we will continue to be a world leader in human challenge studies. They really are becoming part of the mainstream.”
Curriculum Vitae
Name: Carol Dalton
Age: 29
Position: Co-founder of Open Orphan and Poolbeg Pharma, where she is VP of investor relations
Lives: Kilternan, Co Dublin
Education: St Gerard’s in Bray for secondary school. Studied nutraceuticals at DIT, Cathal Brugha Street
Family: Partner Dan
Pastimes: "I’m big into yoga. I’m very big into gardening and grow a lot of my own veg. I was making jewellery for a while, and my boyfriend is a ceramicist, so I tend to nick his clay and make a few bits every so often.”
Favourite book: "The best book I’ve read lately is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.”
Favourite TV show: Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
Business lessons
What would you say to people starting out in college at the moment?
“Not to set your career path in stone. A lot of people say that what you choose when you finish school is what you have to do all your life – and a lot of people in college would have gone on to a masters straight out of college. I think it’s really important to give yourself the time to open your eyes a little wider, and to follow what comes.”
What are your tips for getting ahead in your career?
“I think perseverance and hard work pay off. Personally, I can’t not do a job to the fullest. I might stay in the office until all hours to get it done, but I need to get it done – and I think that pays off."
