ProPhase Labs, Inc. (NASDAQ:PRPH) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

But then next we get into our esophageal cancer test. Again this is all the development stage. This is six years. Nebula six years in its development BE-Smart Esophageal Cancer test is six years in this development. It’s not an overnight wonder nothing happens overnight, but we’re going to go from no one paying attention to this test. Clearly, I don’t believe there’s anything in our market cap for this test. And yet this literally has multibillion-dollar potential. This is a breakthrough cancer test that is sorely needed in the medical community and more importantly for patients. I sincerely believe this is going to save patients’ lives. So — and I think it’s going to save insurance companies billions of dollars. So, it only makes sense — I can’t tell you exactly how we’re going to commercialize this yet.

But what I can tell you is I work 24/7. Everything I do is for the shareholders. I’m the largest shareholder in the company. Friends of mine the other largest shareholders. I create value over time. It’s not a guarantee of the future but I always have in the past. And frankly what I’m working on and what our management team is working on right now I’m significantly more excited about than anything I’ve ever worked on literally my entire career forget everything else that I just talked about. Pharmaloz is to me is now just crossing Ts and dotting Is. That’s just a matter of time before we generate some significant value to the shareholders. That I highly believe is going to happen one way or another whether we sell it, sell the second line — the capacity of the second line or whether we just build the business and start generating a lot of revenues and earnings maybe sell it in 12 or 18 months.

That’s sort of on a fast track to success now not very complicated, right? Nebula Genomics I think has tremendously more potential than our Pharmaloz manufacturing facility, but it’s probably I don’t know six months, nine months behind in terms of the ramp-up in revenues and earnings and recognizable value. And then we have our BE-Smart Esophageal Cancer test, which is kind of the same thing. But what I like about these assets that we’re developing particularly with BE-Smart this is not costing us a lot of money at this point. It’s not like a cancer drug where you’re spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in 10 years to develop it and we’re about to commercialize this. And we’re not spending $10 million a year or $15 million a year right now getting it ready for commercialization.

We’re spending a small fraction of that just to complete. Right now we’re not even really doing a lot of studies. We’re doing statistical studies — statistical analysis because originally this was focused on more as a test to tell you whether or not you have cancer. But our test actually does a lot more than that because we have breakthrough IP patented discoveries relating to the proteins that shift and are expressed differently when you’re developing esophageal cancer. And so our test can recognize those shifts in proteins. That’s something that by the way doesn’t show up in blood until you’re far too progressed and it’s too late and you potentially you get diagnosed you’re going to die of esophageal cancer. It’s great. Is it really a great test?

If it says yes you’re diagnosed with esophageal cancer 80% to 90% of people that are diagnosed die. And if you get diagnosed and two years later you die of esophageal cancer. Is that a great test? I guess maybe to put your financial affairs in order. But when you like a test that actually saves your life then instead of tells you just before you die, it tells you years before that so that you can get an ablation procedure or take other actions to actually prevent getting the cancer. That’s what our test does. So, we’re actually fine-tuning the statistics right now not only to tell you whether or not you have cancer now that we can do with an incredibly high degree of accuracy. But in addition to that right now what we’re working on are the statistics to tell you if you’re in high risk or low risk.

If you’re a high risk, go out and get an ablation procedure, immediately to save your life. If you’re a low risk, you don’t have to get an endoscopy every year. Right now the insurance companies are spending billions and billions of dollars on unnecessary endoscopies. They’re doing that because they don’t know. The GI doesn’t know if you should be getting an endoscopy every year or not. But our test will help guide the proper diagnosis and prognosis, best course of treatment for the patient based on whether you’re a low risk, medium risk, high risk or you have esophageal cancer right now. So, this is an incredible test. It’s just remarkable to me that there’s nothing in our stock price for it. And listen, as a CEO, I don’t know I should say this or not.

There’s no guarantee that’s going to happen. Maybe somehow, we just don’t figure out how to commercialize it. I don’t know. I don’t know how — if there’s even a possibility that we would fail in this I guess there’s some forward-looking statements no guarantees. I don’t see how this isn’t going to be a monster test. You look at a company like Exact Sciences with a $10 billion, $11 billion, $12 billion market cap. And by the way they came out with earnings and said that they have competition now, right? We don’t have any competition for our test. And what’s the value of it in our stock? I don’t know 0. What’s the potential? It’s not an at-home test now, but we’re also going to develop Stage two — Phase 2 and Phase 3 of this test. Who knows one day it might be.

But right now, what we’re focused on are the endoscopies because there’s millions and millions of endoscopies performed every year. And we’re not telling people get endoscopies. But if you’re getting one take a test alongside of it and it’ll give you a high degree of accuracy for diagnosis and prognosis and course of treatment that you don’t have without our test. So I think I stated pretty clearly the excitement of this test. So we have Pharmaloz that we’re going to realize significant value very shortly, whether through the — whether it’s through sale or sale of the second line or through just building revenues and earnings for it. And then behind that, we have Nebula and BE-Smart Esophageal Cancer test. And I’m not going to go more into the numbers again.

I can do that in the Q&A. Again, our focus is seven million endoscopies per year. Our goal once we get CPT codes assuming, we get them I believe we’re going to very soon, if we get them that the insurance will reimburse somewhere around $1,000 to $2,000. It makes it a $7 billion to $14 billion market with no competition pretty incredible. Elsewhere Equivir just really quickly. Again, we’re developing this at very, very little cost. At this point we’re just completing one study. Typically, a dietary supplement. The class action attorneys jump all over you. If you don’t have two studies that total 100 patients, we’re totaling over 300 patients. So we’re doing this the right way. I learned from Cold-EEZE. I turned around Cold-EEZE myself. Equivir is a broad-based antiviral.

We’re going to sell in the same stores. We’re going to do the market the same way. I don’t want to talk about Cold-EEZE it’s not right. We actually still manufacture Cold-EEZE for the owners of Cold-EEZE. So I don’t want to get into that. But I can tell you Equivir has a lot of potential in the marketplace. We have all the infrastructure in place to roll this out ourselves. We don’t need consultants and advisers. We don’t need other companies for manufacturing and distribution and logistics We have all that in place a turnkey solution to rolling this out. We’re going to roll it out online first. In order to get into stores, it always takes longer. So I don’t want to mislead anyone about that. But it has nice potential no value in our stock price.

It’s a nice fourth asset or initiative to mention I don’t make a big deal about it right now but it will fit in nicely. We also have a product called Legendz XL that’s already in the store. It does $2.5 million $3 million a year of business makes about $0.5 million a year. It’s a nice little product. I think Equivir can be a lot bigger than that. And actually, with the social media podcast experts that are working on Nebula Genomics, we may spread out to a bunch of different health tests that may include things like our Legendz XL product like Equivir. So we could with the social media podcast infrastructure we’re building, we ultimately should be able to leverage that not only with Nebula Genomics, but with other health tests and other health products and dietary supplements like Legendz XL and Equivir.

So that’s an awful lot. I’m going to leave it there. I did that in about 24 minutes. I’m happy. I hope there’s a bunch of questions. I love the Q&A. And I want to thank you all for joining me today. Thank you all for those of you that are shareholders for supporting us. I think that I guess I shouldn’t really talk about risk reward. But given the value of some of our assets the fact that we may realize some pretty significant value in the short to intermediate term for Pharmaloz should provide a lot of comfort in terms of downside support. And the upside as I just laid out, we have several initiatives with enormous upside and a management team with a history of success and execution. And with that, Noella, thank you for being with me today.