Linda Powers’ Speech Transcript at the Oppenheimer 25th Annual Health Conference on 12-10-14.
Conference attendee #5: But then, how are you thinking about the regulatory process element? You touched on that, but how are you thinking about commercializing it? Are you going to... because it may be a huge effort given, you know, how many patients you have... Umm
Linda Powers: Are you asking if we're going to do it ourselves or if we're going to partner it? That's always the elephant in the room, so I'll just say it for you. Umm, certainly for sure in brain cancer we're going to do it ourselves. In the whole United States the American Association of Neurosurgeons, AANS, it only has about 3000 surgeon members. And of those, a few hundred are brain surgeons for brain cancer, right. You have a target audience of a few hundred. You have a sales force of 20 people, each of them covering 25 doctors. Bingo, you're there. Right? And that's the U.S. market, that's pretty big. We've given a lot of thought to this. Also, today, if you think about it, what would a big-Pharma bring to the table with this type of a product? Right? They don't have any manufacturing capabilities for a cellular product. They don't have any distribution infrastructure for a cellular product, especially a frozen one, which goes in frozen dry-shippers. Which by the way, there are all kinds of practicalities to this. We ship the product in what are called, 'dry shippers.' Which if remember the little robot in Star Wars, R2D2. It kind of looks like a tall R2D2, right. It's powered by liquid nitrogen. The temperature is stable for at least 12 to 14 days. So if you ship it, and somebody loses it on a loading dock for 3 or 4 days, no problem, you're fine, right. So there's a lot of practicality. Pharma hasn't developed any of that. Right, umm, so really the only thing that Pharma could bring to the table would be, their checkbook. And, umm, we'd rather not be bought.
