I had the interview with Dr. Moro today. It went very well. He was very candid and we built a repoire within a short time on the phone. I wanted to thank "Kag" for suggesting the tape recorder. He (Dr. Moro), has a somewhat heavy french canadian accent and I had to play what he said back a few times in some cases to clearly understand what he said. It is the only way I would have been able to accurately transcribe the questions and answers. I am not at liberty to discuss certain things that we discussed because at certain junctures, he asked me to keep it "in confidence", however, things are looking very good and he answered all of the core questions I asked and then some.
How did the Philadelphia meeting go?
(Dr. Moro)It went very well.
I was wondering how things are going @ Goshen?
(Dr. Moro)"We had to cleave the antibodies that we have. It's only been about a week or two ago that we have been able to do it consistently. It is an IDM antibody, not an ITG antibody, which is a lot trickier to work with. It has taken us the better part of 6 months to figure out how to get the antibody where we want. Our goal with Goshen, is imaging. In order to image the tumors, you want to put the smallest molecule possible in the other person. We are going to be putting antibodies into a person and we don't want them to have a negative reaction. The way to do that is to take all of the excess weight out of the antibody away; and the way to do that is to cleave the antibodies with the enzymes, you now have a much smaller piece. We have been able to reduce it from 950,000 to 140,000 and we can now cleave that into half of the basic parts. As a matter of fact, we are going to now start the animal studies that they are going to need before they take this to the next level, which is imaging. By the end of the year, I anticipate it would be proven that recaf is useful in the process of imaging tumors. You know what, it either works or it doesn't. Other issues can be worked out at a later stage, but the bulk idea of it working or not, should be proved by the end of the year.
Once it's proven that it works, would we license it out to other companies to develop like we did with Abbott?
(Dr. Moro)That's the idea. The only thing I would like to keep for ourselves, is some therapy applications. because at some point and time we start collecting money from royalties, I want to grow us a company, revenue wise. We want to keep something for ourselves. So right now, that is our concern because we have work here for the next 5 to 10 years. We want to plan for the future, manufacture and sell products using aspects of the technology, exclusively, but we are really very, very far away from that at this point. What we want to do is to develop licensing relationships and then move on to a new application
From this date, how long do you think it will take before we see a Recaf product from Abbott?
(Dr. Moro)I can't tell you. I have an idea, but Abbott has muffled me. I can't say because of the regulations.
Are we close?
(Dr. Moro)We are getting closer. That's for sure.
Do you believe the Recaf serum test by Abbott will likely need Pre Market Approval from the FDA?
(Dr. Moro)I don't know. I'll tell you why I don't know. I was talking to these other big guys and I talked to a big company on Tuesday, they came over here. They sell about 16 million PSA tests a year. Some of them think they can get away with a 510K and some think they will need Pre Market Approval.
Do you think these companies that want to license this technology want to combine it with the PSA test?
(Dr. Moro)In some cases, I imagine that would be the case. They are not telling me, but I can smell it. With the Recaf and the PSA, you don't have an overlapping of the correlations, so when you don't have an overlapping correlation of values you get a better result. As a matter of fact, I am working on a patent for the combination. And on the other hand, the fact that you already have a big market for PSA, somebody's going to say,why not put the two together. Now, how are they going to do it, what price are they going to have, I don't know. That one they are keeping very close to their chest.
PSA is good for localizing prostate cancer, but I'm thinking the Recaf technology would locate many other types of cancer.
(Dr. Moro)That's true, but on the other side of the coin, if you want to go to the FDA, and say I have a tumor finding system, the FDA is going to say prove it. They'll want all of the data and samples to run through there own independent system for all of the different kinds of cancers. And that becomes a very, very taxing task, because now they have to do 100 - 200 breasts, 100 - 200 lungs, etc ... . That would take too long. So there is a much easier way to do it. I just want the approval for prostate, and while we get that, we give them the evidence for lung and then I apply for an extension of the application now for lung, and so on and so forth. And so we'll be selling by the time they go for the second one and the third one. It's faster and less expensive, money wise. It will be the same amount of money, but at least we don't have to put it all together.
Given that Recaf can detect lung cancer @ such a high level of specificity, you would think everybody would want a piece of this, especially since the only other way to accurately confirm lung cancer is to do a lung biopsy.
(Dr. Moro)That's right! Well, lung is a tough case. You don't know until you put a brochoscope inside and that's really invasive, and in some cases you can't reach it either. If you have an image of some sort and you have an elevated Recaf, then you can basically say that the person has the cancer.
How much longer do you think we will be on the pinks?
(Dr. Moro)That's a very intriguing question because we have also been moving very swiftly in that area. We have answered questions, they have come back with more questions, we have answered those questions, so we have this back and forth with the NAS, so it looks very good now, but I don't know what's in the future for us, because I've been burned so many times already. One thing I can tell you for sure is this, no matter how many times they say no, we are going back. Eventually, at some point, they are going to run out of questions. We now have a broker / dealer that seems to be working very well with us. We have to wait and see how everything pans out. We have a number of things that are brewing, we are working on some financing, in terms of the work in the lab. It's a funny business, because we have a lot of people working on products and on different deals. What's happening now, basically is a lull period where we really have nothing to say. So we have had no press releases because we have nothing to say. What happens is, you are creating a pressure, a thrist for things to happen. So then what happens is, all of a sudden now you have ten things happening at once, which is no good either because I would prefer to spread the news over a period of time. People exaggerate if you put too much out. But if it happens it happens. You can not control them.
What it's going to take to get the stock to move is the announcement of more licensing deals?
(Dr. Moro)You know, I am surprised at two things. The first is at how stable we have been, trading between .70 - .80. The second is, when we put out a press release or two, we get about a .20 swing, with very little significant news. It's kind of awkward because we have about 4,000 share holders, you would imagine, in order to move that number of shareholders, you would think it would take something bigger than that, but it doesn't. I am glad it works like that because otherwise it would be an insurmountable task. Answer me this. You trade in stocks, I don't. I am a science guy. How do you explain this, we sign a deal with the number one diagnostic company in the world, then the stock goes to $2.30, then the works starts to get done. Every week that goes by, we are closer to the finish line. But yet and still we wind up down to .70. I can't make heads or tails of that, can you?
Yeah, it's because we are trading on the pink sheets. People view stocks trading on the pinks as extremely high risk!!!
(Dr. Moro)Well, we'll see what happens when we go off the pinks. Personally, I think we will get a little bump when we go to the OTC, nothing significant. We are working on and close to getting financing for millions of dollars (we are talking to a number of people about that), then getting into dynamics. After we get into dynamics, we need to raise about 4 million dollars. I'm close to getting revenue from Abbott for royalties. It holds me back a little bit in terms of, why increase the share base of the company when we can get our money from Abbott? But I need to move to AMEX, or the Nasdaq (small cap), we can get out even from the bulletin board. At that time we are going to have a very, very different credibility and access to additional money that there is no way we have access to so far.
We are not going to be able to get off the OTC until we begin to get those royalties from Abbott, right?
(Dr. Moro)Well, I can do it through financing because what you basically need is to have 4 million dollars in assets. If you do that, it doesn't matter which way it comes, we get the money from Abbott, we get the money from the market, it's okay. The question is, why dilute the shareholders, if you are going to get it in a short period of time from Abbott. I rather stay on the bulletin board for another year. There are other things, for example: There are many other sides of the technology I want to develop and the patents are not for an indefinite time frame. They expire. You see, so by not exploiting the use of the special patents, we are also losing value. It's a delicate balance.
(This is one of the parts of the interview he asked me to keep confidential.)
(Dr. Moro)How we get value for the company is not a matter of licensees, or the next press release, but it's a matter of where the company is going to be in the next ten years, that's the press release. You have to consider both things.
The patents will expire within the next 10 years, right?
(Dr. Moro)That's not a major consideration because as I told you before, we are writing new ones, which are extensions of what we have. For example, we have ways of preparing and purifying Recaf, every thing we do now will be included in the patents. The licensees would have to keep on paying us with the extensions of the patents.
Well it sounds good!
(Dr. Moro)It does, you know(-),I find myself, sometimes, thinking to myself, I should be jumping up and down, but I'm not. The reason that I'm not is that we get samples from different sources all of the time, and the wave lengthens and we get some interesting results. For example, we get a result that is 85% good, which is down from 92% and 95%, and I get depressed. And I think to myself, what am I getting depressed about? The Recaf works in an unbelieveable way, there is nothing out there that picks up 85%, let alone 95%. It's that I get use to it, and then I get more and more critical. People are saying, what's wrong with you, you should be enthused, but you get spoiled after a while.
(The next question I asked, he answered, but asked me to keep it confidential.)
However, as an offshoot of this particular part of our conversation, he gave me some numbers: Lung cancer 97% sensitivity and 97.5% specificity (out of 22 cancers) ; Breast is 98.7% sensitivity with 97.5% specificity (out of 88 cancers).
What is helping you to secure the financing? Is it the technology itself?
(Dr. Moro)Yeah!If you go to a pipe or something like that, you really have to pull down your pants. This way, we finance all the money that we need and it's working very well for us. About what price did you buy?
I bought 130,000 shares at an average price of 1.19.
(Dr. Moro)I wouldn't be concerned about your purchase price. We will be over that shortly. We are significantly underpriced, the market is unreasonable for what we have here, that is .78.
Yeah, I was a bit concerned, being that I paid 1.19 for so many shares and seeing it drop to .70.
(Dr. Moro)You have to be patient. Most of the stock is restricted. That will pay off for you.
How many shares are outstanding?
(Dr. Moro)We have about 38 million or something like that.
Are you holding off on putting anymore shares on the market until the price goes up? Because you had a press release not too long ago regarding selling more shares to investors @ 2.50 per share.
(Dr. Moro)What happened was, we put through a registration stock, to go and sell stock directly through the company and if it is registered, it is not restricted and it allows investors to buy it and we can raise more money. When we did it, we did it at $2.50 because the share price at the time was hovering around the $2.00 mark at the time of the Abbott deal. We actually pulled that out because of the reduction in price. I don't really want to finance at these levels. One and two hundred thousand dollars is not a big deal. I don't want to raise millions of dollars at these levels because it would be murder. Having the stock at $2.00 eight or nine months ago, is criminal, to finance at these levels. And I've got money in the bank so, I'm not worried about it. I have to go, I have somebody waiting on me. Call me anytime you need.
