Fluoro Pharma Medical
(OTCBB:FPMI)
CEO & Chair: Thijs Spoor
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Juan Costello: Good day from Wall Street this is Juan Costello, Senior Analyst with the Wall Street Reporter and joining us today is Thijs Spoor, the Chairman and CEO for Fluoro Pharma Medical Incorporated. The company trades are OTCBB and their ticker symbol is FPMI. Thanks for joining us today Thijs.
Thijs Spoor: Thank you very much Juan I appreciate you taking the time.
Juan Costello: Great any time and so starting off give us a brief history and overview of the company for some of our listener that are new to you story.
Thijs Spoor: Sure so the company was started in Boston as a private company with technology coming from the Massachusetts general hospital. The company founder was an inventor that regulates innovates in the imaging space and we have the unique opportunity in 2011 to take the company public through some urge and that allowed us to fund operations to really to move our portfolio forward into phase two programs for two of our lead products and move everything forward on the rest of the pipeline, the company that’s fundamentally based on imaging drug technology and we have a robust portfolio of opportunities that we see in clear unmet medical needs in heart imagining.
Juan Costello: Great and so Thijs talk about some of the products in your portfolio and some of the other products that you have or may have in the pipeline.
Thijs Spoor: Sure we have two lead candidates that are entering phase two trials now Cardio-PET and BFPET. BFPET is the easiest one to understand, it’s a – it’s a drug that gets that should be used in about some of the 12 million procedures that are currently been done is for perfusion imaging in America. So a lot of people know someone who’s gone for an exercise treadmill test who will be given the treadmill and they take exercise they will injected with a dye or drug that shows blood flow in the heart at stress and we compare it that with rest go to give a diagnoses for what’s happening with in the patients heart.
Juan Costello: Yeah I mean the yearly physicals right?
Thijs Spoor: Then also the yearly physicals happens to a certain degree if we are looking at the heart and then once the doctor thinks that things are getting so for maybe some questions that need to be addressed so the go on for the, so exercise treadmill test with using the radio active dye and what we offer is a high res version of that dye so the current test right now is about between 65% and 75% accurate and we would hope that our drug should come in between 85 and 90% accurate in terms of be able to pick up disease it would be able to do this because PET as an imaging technology it really brings things into higher resolution so it’s almost like the conversion from low STD to HTD and we hope to bring that with medical images.
Juan Costello: Excellent.
Thijs Spoor: And then our second drug cardio PET is also for the heart, but it’s a slightly different indication and it’s a radio active fatty acid so the main source of energy for the cells in your heart is fatty acids and really what cardio PET should do is be able to identify areas where the muscle cant take up the fatty acid as much and you see that is where that the muscle that doesn’t work as well so it is almost like a bruise or as the heart and muscle cells starts to get damaged and die off there’s usually see a direct correlation with the manner of cardio PET is there independent of an exercise test and so really for resting situation and for patients in the emergency room and a few other situations with acute coronary syndrome it’s called and there’s a really interesting application to build the image of the heart. The cool thing about this drug is that it’s low resolutions of chemical cousin, the same inventor has been approved in Japan as using 20% of procedures in Japan so we have pretty strong basis for understanding why the drug should perform well in the U.S.
Juan Costello: Certainly and so talk about the recent equity financing and some of the details there.
Thijs Spoor: Sure so what we did is we, we issued common stock at 85cents a share and with that there was more coverage, there’s a 100% more coverage at 90 cents one year all cash warrant and so what that meant is we had some investors who really liked the outside potential that is there in our stock especially moving into some data points that we see coming up soon. Over the next six months we’d expect to get more data coming out on both our Cardio-PET and/or BFPET programs and those will be meaningful catalyst to really transform the evaluation that’s inherent in the company. I think right now with – so a company with two phase one asserts where deeply discounted already once we have two phase asserts then there should be a significant uptick in valuation for anyone doing us some of the parts now for us or risk adjust the DCF or any of these evaluation metrics out there, it really becomes a very interesting opportunity.
Juan Costello: Right what are some of the other trends that you’re seeing right now in the sector now position in the company to capitalize on them?
Thijs Spoor: So if you look at the overall imaging industry, there is a big transformation into PET imaging. So our people know PET imaging for cancer scanning and there really is making transition now where Eli Lilly just had a drug approved for Alzheimer’s disease, it’s a PET imaging drug, there’s three other companies with drugs right behind it all for Alzheimer’s disease and if you look at a number of procedures out there you know there’s these 12 million cardiac procedures are all currently performed using current standard of care and this is terrific opportunity for PETs imaging to move in there as well. And in the capital markets you know you tend to see that the Micro cap companies are – have taken a bit of a hit, but certainly coming into the end of this year people are taking sort of tax gains before the tax rates go up and we’re seeing some interest in the Micro cap, the way people are served and delivered Alpha on their portfolios and there has been some interest out there for ways to get that, so certainly our investors that put the money in this latest private placement I do, hopefully they were thinking about that.
Juan Costello: Well certainly and so what are some of the factors that makes the company unique from some of the other players in the sector and better suited to grab market share?
Thijs Spoor: So we have robot IP in our compounds. The IP is licensed from Massachusetts’s general hospital, the research at Harvard that developed it and have granted an exclusive worldwide license on the technology. And certainly moving forward it’s very, very difficult to actually get anything approved for heart imaging because if you look at the heart and liver they are so close to each other in the chest and the liver main job in the body is to take any drug that is put in to the body and clear it out, so the trick is design a compound that sneaks past the liver and goes to the heart and really identifies what’s happening within that patient and we call this imprecision diagnostic within the field of personalized medicine and the reason for that is that each patient that walks in is going to have something slightly different in their body and what we do is we pick up those really subtle chemical changes in patients body before the disease really manifest itself. So certainly as we look in terms of where we position ourselves, it’s really an emerging field with new compounds, new products that offer higher accuracy and also should provide lower radiation dose to the patient as wells so we’re concerned about with patient safety as well as efficacy.
Juan Costello: Good and perhaps you could walk us through your background experiences base and talk a little bit about the management there.
Thijs Spoor: Sure. So you know part of what differentiates us too is that we are very lean organization, we have very low monthly burn and that’s because we only have five employees. We do this because we project manage our drug assets, we are not trying to be the next big research shop, our job is to take the three things we have and walk them up the valley chain, to that extent, I’m a nuclear pharmacist, I spent 11 years at the world leader in nuclear imaging, company called Amersham, now got by GE and I spent several year in Wall Street at firms such as J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse covering the Biotechnology Medical Device sectors as a self of analyst and then so decided to come back to industry because I saw such terrific opportunities for unmet medical needs at Fluoro Pharma portfolio they were able to deliver, I have a terrific pathologist on staff who runs the clinical trials and then we have a who’s who of experts who form our scientific advisor board who are able to give the various specific discreet some clinical judgment and so that was needed to make sure we were doing the best trials that we can.
Juan Costello: Now what are some of the goals and milestones that you and the team are hoping to accomplish over the next year?
Thijs Spoor: So next year we are expect to get data coming out from both our cardio, phase two data for both our Cardio-PET and BFPET platforms so for that’s we has a company that will be transforming that in two phase two assets and everyone knows that Pharma is really out looking for new assets that they can deliver as of two phase two validated assets something the industry does for their needs, but also over the next few years we expect to deliver on some of other compounds, we have an interesting compound for imaging vulnerable plaque and some other ideas that our scientific advisors have that we should really apply to deliver share holder value.
Juan Costello: And in terms of investors and the financial community based do you believe that the Fluoro Pharma story and your message and the upside are completely understood and appreciated by them and it’s not what you wish investors better understood about the company?
Thijs Spoor: So what the Street really underestimates with the company right now is that as in our phase one data we actually got really good human images and so large portion of the phase two information is actually de-risked and those shouldn’t called the normal history model, so normally in the phase two drug program it’s your first hand to even see if the drugs going to even work in humans and with our phase one we get images we see that the drug images in humans and so the question of phase two is just how offensive it is so I think what the street misses is two things one is that we actually have a lot of insight in terms of what we expect the phase two to report out at and the second thing I think is necessary is these are massive markets and so currently your 12 million procedures in the US there’s about $7 billion imaging market globally that’s projected rise to $15 billions and that big rope is coming from new proprietary trader service. I mean I think t he street this is the fact that these are huge drugs they usually think they are diagnostic devices, but they are drugs with drug like profit margins in various entry.
Juan Costello: Well good answer and so once again joining us today is Thijs Spoor the CEO and Chairman for Fluoro Pharma Medical. The company trades on the Bulletin Board ticker symbol is FPMI. And before we conclude here Thijs to briefly recap some of your key points why do you believe investors should consider the company as a good investment opportunity today.
Thijs Spoor: So thanks Juan I mean I think really as we look at the company we have meaningful data expected to read out over the next – over the short time period of an extra four to six months and certainly data reading out over that period just should give us step function evaluation boost to the company, really transforming it from a company where there’s phase one assets to company of two phase two assets and certainly getting into the next eight or six month or so there’s great innovation that happens here that we should be able to talk to the street about.
Juan Costello: Well good and currently the company is trading at 75 cent to share the market cap is north $16.8 million and we’d like to thank you Thijs for taking the time to join us today and update our investor audience on Fluoro Pharma.
Thijs Spoor: Great thank you for your time.