nanosynth Group plc (LON:NNN) Chief Executive Officer Mark Duffin caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss what the company does, the Volz trial results, joint venture with a global wellness company and what investors can expect for the rest of the year.
Q1: First off, Mark, can you just remind investors what nanosynth Group does?
A1: We’re a technology company that takes natural materials and creates them into small particles which can be coated with other ingredients or coatings, and they can be applied to various industries to be used for a whole host of applications. It is something that’s very well known in the market, although nano was never really a word for many people that they associated with this process over many years.
Q2: Now, a positive set of interims out today. Could you firstly talk us through the trial results with Volz and what it actually means for the company?
A2: We’re very, very happy with the interims today, it’s a clear indication of moving forward. We’ve spent a lot of time positioning the business and dealing with some of the historic issues.
The Volz trials are very exciting, we’ve completed our fifth trial with Volz and obviously applied for the REACH application, which was successfully awarded. We are basically at the moment finalising the paperwork for leach testing, which means about disposing of the filters and the media into normal land waste.
Now, the results we’ve had are fantastic, and the application has gone in. We’re just waiting for that to come back to us, that should be somewhere around about the end of October. That means then that Volz have everything that they need to be able to progress and start to sell the product into the marketplace, which will mean that we’ve become the first antipathogenic solution being applied to filter media.
Q3: You talked about a joint venture with a global wellness company for a project in the cosmetic market. Can you tell us more about that?
A3: Obviously, the client has asked for confidentiality at this moment in time. We were talking to three major global player within that space.
One of the big factors is that there is a real shift to come up with a natural material that helps alleviate the aspects of cancer within the cosmetic market space. It’s a generalised issue across the globe, America’s likely to be the first place that will instigate changes in legislation for this and this organisation that we’re working with is very much world leading.
We are going to undertake the joint development programme with them which will run over the 12 month period. After that 12 month period, we are moving to a commercial agreement, subject to obviously both parties hitting the correct milestones, delivering the correct results.
The positive for us, other than the fact that we’re exceedingly excited to be working with this company, and obviously the global opportunity is huge out of this for us with the success of the development, the two other organisations that were looking to partner with us realise that we can’t obviously share any information now, but they potentially will become customers of GB Nano where they can buy ingredients and undertake work themselves. This obviously means that we will become hopefully a major player within that space in the foreseeable future.
Q4: I know you’re very confident about the near term prospects for the business, but what can investors expect from nanosynth Group for the rest of the year?
A4: We obviously, as you can appreciate from RNS’s that we’ve released currently to date, we are aiming on doing about 37 different projects in 7 verticals. The key for us, obviously, was to try and determine which verticals might be more proactively interested in partnering far quicker than others. Those verticals range everything from medical to food, to electronics, to animal-based products and a whole host of other things.
What I can say to you is that we are getting a huge amount of traction. I would anticipate that we would sign a good handful of those commercial research agreements by Christmas. My hope is that there will be some exciting things that can come out of that because the application of what we’re doing really has a huge opportunity in various spaces ranging from containing heat within fast delivery products, being used to the electronic space, to the filter space as well as animal feed products.
