Protein Polymer Technologies, Inc. (fka PPTIQ)

[kruy]

O/S is 113M shares. Float is around 20M, the rest is held by insiders, primarily by TAG Virgin Islands, formerly Taurus Group LLC. TAG is being sued by Matthew Szulik, former CEO and founder of Redhat Corp., for mishandling his investments...of which PPTI is one of those investments. Szulik has loaned PPTI approx 8-9 million dollars in the last 5 years to keep it afloat. If this is secured by the assets of PPTI is to be determined by the BK judge I assume, as it is not directly clear.

PPTI does have some assets, outside of its patent portfolio. It has a deal with Sanyo Corp in Japan to use patented tech for product development, but only nets the company payments of $100-200K per year until something comes to market, after which royalties supposedly will take over. I don't think what Sanyo is working on has ever been made public.

Also, PPTI owns 2.5M shares of Spinewave, a private corp that has some successful medical devices on the market. Those shares at one time may have been worth as much as $10-20M, but placements to raise cash has diluted those shares over the last decade to where they are probably only worth several hundred thousand dollars. Spinewave is using PPTI's NuCore tech to develop a back disc replacment by using scratch DNA..this is in last stages of clinical trials but still at least 2 years from FDA approval. PPTI is supposed to get royalites off of those sales which could possibly have been a blockbuster, but unless a BK judge awards royalties to shareholders in the future it is now meaningless.

That, in a nutshell is basically what's what, but it's a shame they could not make a go of it. IMO, if it were not for the Szulik/TAG lawsuit, they might have made it, as some corporate investors were waiting to infuse cash and restructure the company.

What the worth of these shares are, if any, depends on what a BK judge would decide, and I'm guessing Szulik will have a lot to say about any assets if any remain IMO.