OptiBiotix Health PLC (LON:OPTI) Chief Executive Officer Stephen O’Hara caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the key points from their half-year report
Q1: Interim results just out, what are the key points you want to get across to investors from those results?
A1: I think there’s a number of areas I want to bring out, I’d cover that under IP, science and commercial. We made progress across all those 3 fronts.
If we take IP first of all, we’ve had an increase since November from 11 patents to 44 patents so that’s a 4 times increase which is a substantial increase over a short amount of time, also increased the breadth of those patents, increasing those to 15 families. It’s very important when you’re a company at the stage we’re at that you protect your inventions and in fact this is often a large part of due diligence when you happen commercial deals but also it’s important for OptiBiotix Health because it positions us as a media stakeholder in the microbiome space and this space has been estimated to be worth a trillion dollars and to have a growth rate of 22.3% in years ahead so our IP positions us very nicely in this particular space.
Second area, and it links in really to the IP, is the science and OptiBiotix Health have made substantial progress over the last 6 months in a number of our technology platforms, I’ll just cover those off now. The first area is on the development of what we call SweetBiotix which are sweet and calorie-free sugars, what we’ve been able to achieve over the last 6 months is we’ve been able to synthesise the sugars and we produced a whole range of them and we linked the sweeteners to the structure of the particular sugar. We tested these sugars in human studies and those human studies have shown that they are sweet and they are safe so rather than a concept we’re trying to develop we’ve now proven that in human studies, that is a substantial leap in that particular area.
The other area where we’ve made a lot of progress in is the development of sugars that can modulate the microbiome and what we’ve been able to demonstrate over the last 6 months now we can create these sugars and we can modulate the microbiome in a very targeted way right the way down to the strain level. So the strain is the most specific level so if you take humans as an example then the species would be all humans and the strain would be individuals so me or yourself so a very targeted way and probably more importantly we’ve been able to demonstrate that by changing the growth rate on these particular organisms we can have a large effect on the biological activity which influences health. So being able to demonstrate for a number of organisms but for example which will be familiar to investors will be our cholesterol reducing strain we’ve been able to show we can produce sugars for that particular strain and if we feed the sugar to the strain it grows far more quickly than any other bacteria in the gut and it enhances the cholesterol reducing effect. Now if you step back a little bit and look at the highest level and you say well the microbiome is a really exciting field and it’s worth a trillion dollars and people recognise that by modulating the microbiome you can prevent the development of disease and manage disease and treat diseases and clearly having a means to modulate the microbiome in a very targeted way has got tremendous value. So this is a significant scientific development and this is the first time this has ever been reported and will have a number of applications coming forward on this over the next few months so a significant scientific breakthrough.
Moving now onto the commercial side, we have had 2 deals in the last 6 months and if people look at them they’ll recognise that the quality of the deals that we’re working and the partners we’re working with is far greater than maybe the earlier deals. So OptiBiotix Health have had 2 deals, one with DSM the world’s largest ingredients supplier and the other with KSF who own the SlimFast brand and these deals are important because they show acceptance of global corporate of our technology, of our concepts and as I mentioned earlier of our IP. These companies pay for taking our IP and developing it into their particular product so it covers the cost of product development and studies in those particular areas so it’s a way of getting income for further and private development.
We also made 2 acquisitions and one of those is SkinBiotix which I think is a tremendous acquisition which we bought in IP from Manchester University and we created a majority-owned joint venture with Manchester called SkinBiotix Limited and this opens up a whole range of new opportunities in skin health, in wound care, in psoriasis/eczema which I think will be of great value in the future. The second acquisition, which is post interim, only in the last month or so, was The Healthy Weight Loss Company but I’m sure investors can already see the benefit of that, we’ve incorporated SlimBiome, our weight management formulation, into their products and we’ve had tremendous consumer feedback on these particular products so everyone that has used these products have lost weight, they’ve had a reduction in hunger and they’ve had a reduction in snacking. I think people don’t appreciate the paradigm shift that’s happened in terms of this particular product because now typically people lose weight by restricting calories and you restrict calories by eating less or by having less sugar and fat within products, what we’ve been able to do with our particular formulation is create a product that helps people to lose weight, it helps them by enhancing their satiation so you feel fuller for longer, they don’t want to snack and so they have less calories. So whilst reducing calorie intake has been proven for many many years to reduce weight, the issue is sustaining that calorie reduction over a period of time and it’s clear from our customer feedback which people can see on Amazon but we’ve also got an independent study looking at this which we’ll report later on in the year, we’ve made a great move forward in this particular area. We’re quite excited about SlimBiome, not just in The Healthy Weight Loss Company but moving forward in other product areas and also internationalising the GoFigure products as the word of success of the product spreads.
So great progress in terms of IP, great progress in terms of science and great progress on the commercial front and probably more importantly for investors in terms of the outlook we’ve got a lot more to come with the internationalisation of GoFigure product, with the cholesterol product which we’re in discussions over the product for quite a number of months now. The challenge has been that as we go into the process we’ve had other parties express interest, one at the earlier part of the year and one in the Spring, and whilst we already have an offer on the table we as shareholders and Board members of OptiBiotix Health we feel that it’s our duty to make sure that we gain the best agreement and the best deal from partners. We work with partners who don’t just see the cholesterol product as a single product but see the full scale of the opportunity in terms of combination product and a potential to use this product to treat Clostridium difficile infection and to potentially reduce statin dosage. So a lot of things to come in the future and very excited over a number of areas, in particular the sugar area where we’ve got a lot of interest. Now having established that we can produce the sweet sugars and they are shown to be safe and sweet in human studies and we hope to see some commercial traction on that over the forthcoming months so a good 6 months and look forward to another 6 months in the months ahead and reporting later on in the year at our AGM a successful 2016.
