OptiBiotix Health Plc (LON:OPTI) Chief Executive Officer Stephen O’Hara caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the further fund raise of £2.2 million, what these funds will be used for and the opportunities in skin health
Q1: We’ve just seen news informing of a further fund raise, can you tell us why did you raise further funds when you’ve still got £2.2 million available?
A1: I think there’s 2 reasons really, the first reason is that we got a lot of investor interest in a new raise so our brokers can informed us there was a lot of interest in the stock out there, that’s the first reason. The main reason is that when we look at how much we’ve progressed over the last year, we made a lot of progress in a short space of time and you’ve got to ask the question, if you raise funds can you really create value from those particular funds, and we felt there was an opportunity out there that, based on our progress in the last year, to use the funds to invest the platforms that we have more quickly and to really consolidate our leading position in a microbiome space.
Q2: So what will you actually use the funds for?
A2: The first reason is that we want to bring a lot of the technology platforms that we currently out-house back in-house, and that’s very important, so we’re trying to build a company that has large shareholder value for the future. When you build a company, you out-house some of your R&D platforms then when companies look at you externally and look with respect to acquire you, then a couple of things they’ll look at, one of the things is IP, and we have a great IP portfolio that we developed and we’ll develop in the future, the second thing is capability, this is a really interesting space and we’ve built a lot of capability over the last year or so, we want to bring a lot more capability back in-house. We want to use the funds to employ a number of people; a chief scientist, a senior scientist and a couple of other scientists, to really push forward in this particular space and give us capability that will be of interest to other parties in the future. The second reason is we really want to turn the handle on some of our technology platforms, they’ve moved really from research platforms to validated platforms that have real commercial value. We’ve proven over the last year that we came up with an idea, we turned that idea into a proof of concept, we can then take that particular proof of concept and validate the idea in human studies and validate it with a commercial deal so we’ve taken our platforms idea right the way the human studies and to commercial deals. We want to turn the handle on those technology platforms to create a broader pipeline of products for the future. The third reason is that we feel there’s some new application areas out there where we can use some of our existing technologies and apply them into other application areas, one of those examples being skin health.
Q3: Can you tell me a bit more about the skin opportunity?
A3: Strategically, we look at big markets where there’s a growth opportunity and skin health is one of those areas. So over the last 12/18 months, our technology platforms have been able to demonstrate, in terms of gut health, that we can control some of the tight junctions, these are the gaps between cells that you find and you can control energy harvest as a consequence of that, we can also control some of the organisms that you have within the gut so we can change their populations so what applies to gut health can equally apply to skin health. So by controlling these tight junctions, the gap between the cells and in particular skin cells, we can tighten those tight junctions and make the gap between cells a lot narrower and in doing so, you can reduce moisture loss and tighten up the skin so that has potential applications in the cosmetic industry. The other sort of area we’ve been looking at is you can, I talked about changing populations of organisms in the gut, is we have ability to change populations organisms not just in the gut but also on the skin so healthcare-acquired infections, these are infections with very resistant organisms, there’s a big problem within healthcare in an area that I have a high degree of expertise in so we now have the ability to change the organisms on the skin. So that has a massive opportunity in healthcare-acquired infections which is set to be $82 billion market. Finally, with some of the technologies that we work with we know impact upon other factors, so for example healing, then we can look at how we can control some of the wound or inflammatory responses that you get with some skin diseases for example psoriasis and eczema, and again that’s another opportunity. So my brief is that skin health could be as big as, if not bigger, than what we have currently, so that with our other technology platform which is the SweetBiotix, these are the sweet sugars, I think now we’ve got a company that has a broad range of platforms which have numerous product and numerous partnering opportunities. I think this is great news for shareholders, it builds the value of the company, it de-risks the company and it creates a great opportunity to grow OptiBiotix Health Plc beyond where it is currently today.
