Greetings. Welcome to the Pressure BioSciences mid-year 2024 business update call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Richard Schumacher, President and CEO. You may begin.
Thank you, John, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. As always, we're going to begin with a cautionary statement. The following remarks may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, those detailed from time to time in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which such statements may be based.
Before we begin, I want to let everybody know that I'm happy to introduce again for everyone our Chairman, Jeff Peterson, and our Head of Sales and Marketing, John Hollister. Both Jeff and John are on.
Howdy. This is Jeff.
This is John. Thanks. It's great to be here.
And I'm the only one whose name doesn't start with J. So briefly, what we're going to talk about today, we're going to very briefly go over some financials from last year. We're also going to talk about the relocation, which is a very important part of the growth of this company. We're going to talk a little bit on an update about Uncle Bud's Health and Wellness . We're going to talk a bit about the core business. Particularly, we're going to expand our discussion on UltraShear Technology . And we're also going to introduce a new program that I'm very proud of, that it is just starting, and we believe it's something whose time has come, and it's going to be very helpful for us as we introduce all these new products that we've been talking about for the last few months.
This program is what we call a joint venture program, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Going back to the agenda, the first part of the agenda is to briefly talk about fiscal year 2023. I want to start by apologizing to all stakeholders for us being late in our filing. The 10-K annual report was filed on June 7th. It contains a lot of information in it. We're sorry that it came late. We had a number of issues that hampered us, and one in particular was the move. We expected the move to take 3-4 weeks, and it took 5 months.
We ran into a number of problems, everything from not being able to move in January 1st as we first thought, not really getting until mid-February, not getting our license to produce CBD and other things until March, and then not being able to actually set up the labs until April and do our first manufacturing runs into May. The tenant who was in before us left late. They left an animal facility that had to be decontaminated. That took almost a month to get someone in to do that. There are a number of things that were not in our control that happened that just added to each other. And the next thing you know, we were late. Because we were late moving in, a lot of things were impacted, including getting going on the 10-K and all the work that had to be done on the 10-K.
We take our filing seriously. I started the company 26 years ago, and we went public. I started more than 26 years ago. We went public 26 years ago. We've been late, I believe, for the K three times. This is the third. We take it very seriously. We're very upset, and we're going to do everything we can to make this the third and last time that we're late in filing the K. We're also late in filing the Q. Our target date for the Q is June 30th. We're working hard to make that date on June 30th. Again, once we get back to being in compliance, our goal is never to be out of compliance again. It's costing us a lot of time and money to try to catch up. We apologize to all stakeholders for any inconvenience that we're causing people.
In terms of the K itself, what I'd like to do is just let everyone know that I'm available from tomorrow on. If you'd like to discuss anything in the K, particularly, just send me an email. We'll set up a time. I'm happy to go one-on-one with anybody on answering any questions on the K itself. And the same thing will be happening with the Q. And when the Q is filed, I'll be happy to take questions. Just email me, rschumacher@pressurebiosciences.com, and I'll set up a time, and we'll go through everything that needs to go through for the numbers. We have a limited amount of time, and we really need to spend the time not on looking back in the past on what happened in 2023, but what's going to happen in the rest of 2024 and 2025 going forward.
We have a lot of interesting, exciting events that are going on, the change, like the joint venture program. This is what we want to talk about going forward. How do we jettison and get our sales moving and get these products made and be the company that we all want Pressure Bio to be? So moving on to the agenda, I've talked about the relocation. What I didn't say and what I need to make clear is we are in so much better position now with this facility than we ever were in the previous facility in southeastern Massachusetts. That was an office facility with 95% office space, and we turned a couple of offices into a lab because when we moved in, we were not. We were a virtual company. We sent everything out to get done. Now we are a manufacturing company.
We're in a space that's 90% manufacturing labs. I salivate when I walk in here in the morning and leave at night looking at the laboratory space we have, multiple laboratory space, and the space we have to grow. So we're in a building that we can grow in quite well going forward. So I'm very, very happy to be here. I'm sorry it took us so long to get functional. We did our first manufacturing run about four weeks ago. It worked. Everything's been working ever since. So we're ready for business. In terms of.
I would add on to that, Rick. I would add on to that that in addition to the benefit on the manufacturing side, this allowed us to consolidate our R&D team back into headquarters with the entire team. So the extra synergy of having everybody together in one place has been terrific.
That's a great point, Jeff. We've been working for 12 years with a lab north of Boston and our lab south of Boston. Occasionally, the twain would meet. There's nothing like getting to meet somebody eyeball to eyeball. The efficiency is so much better. I'm glad you pointed that out. I'll bring it one further. The cost, we increased the size by about 20% of the space we have. Not only is it better space, but we increased the amount of footage by 20%. We decreased our monthly lease by 20%-30% because we're paying one lease instead of two. It has a lot of benefits. It came with a big price tag, unfortunately, for lost time. Now we're going to start to see the benefits. We're going to talk briefly about Uncle Bud's.
Uncle Bud's is the group that we purchased in January. Uncle Bud's Health and Wellness, they are pretty much an online store through both their online and their work through Amazon. They do sell to some of the big retail stores also during the course of the year. They have about 75 SKUs. They have about 10 or 12 very good big sellers. We talked a couple of months ago about an idea that the terrific group at Uncle Bud's and us came up with, which was a new premium collection using our nanoemulsification to make some of their already good products better. We talked about 6 products that we are keying in on: product for sleep, products for feminine hygiene, products for sexual wellness, and also nootropics or cognitive memory enhancers, immune boosters, and skin care.
We will talk about the last three because we've made very good progress in these. These are all on our docket, slated for release sometime in the second half of 2024. One of them in particular, we're already well along moving into it, and we'll talk about that shortly. The core business, we've made it very clear over the last year and a half. We still are very much involved with Pressure Cycling Technology. We still have 400+ instruments around the world. We still service these instruments. We sell consumables, and we continue to sell instruments. We have an instrument going out tomorrow. We're doing a show and tell at a very large pharmaceutical company, and we hope to get a purchase order from them shortly thereafter. So it's very important.
The Pressure Cycling or PCT business is very important to us, and we'll maintain it, and we'll continue to grow it. But it is on the middle burner to the back burner because of UltraShear technology. Same with BaroFold. The BaroFold technology is important to us. We published, we sent out a press release in November or early December where we talked about working with Lonza in the press release, co-publishing with them. They are the largest contract manufacturing and development corporation in the world. As we understand, they're the largest. The use of this instrument in the area of biologics, of protein therapeutics, is where we're keying it. And the protein therapeutics market is expected by 2030 to be more than $500 billion in size. I believe that's probably why Lonza is interested in our technology and we're interested.
So we still have a lot of interest in those areas, but our biggest interest is in UltraShear technology. And I'm going to turn it over to Jeff, I think, to let Jeff give a brief background on UltraShear. Our shareholders certainly know what it is. But Jeff, maybe you can give an overview and talk about where we're taking this incredible technology.
Sure. Yeah, I'm glad to. So the thing that is so exciting about this is UltraShear is about taking mixtures of oil and water to a new level of effectiveness. Our bodies and plants and animals are all based on water-based biochemistry. And a lot of things that we utilize are soluble in water, but a great many important active nutrients and therapeutics are molecules that are only soluble in oil. And to get those absorbed by our bodies is a real challenge for this water-based biochemistry, whether you're trying to rub it on your skin or ingest it and get it in through the stomach and the gastrointestinal route. It's a major challenge. And people have mixed oil and water historically from shaking up a bottle of salad dressing, and you see how it mixes up into an emulsion and then separates.
People can blend the daylights out of it and get those droplets even down into millions of a meter. Still, that is not stable, and it'll separate over time. Newest technologies talk about bringing it down into the nano-emulsion space where the droplet sizes are down in billions of a meter. But even in that space, it ranges from nanometers to tens of nanometers to hundreds of nanometers. And at the higher end of that spectrum, they're still too big, and they're still not stable when they're that large. And the ability to absorb the oil molecules out of those droplets, even in the hundreds of nanometers, is still terribly inefficient for our bodies. Our technology, UltraShear, is able to make nano-emulsions effectively, repeatedly, and precisely and hit very tight targets down in the 50, 40, 60 nanometer droplet size area.
At that size, individual molecules are down in the sort of single nanometer or sub-nanometer space, depending on the size of the molecule. So we're dealing with droplets here where there's literally a handful, a countable number of molecules going across that droplet. And when that goes through your body, you can pull all those oil molecules out of the droplet and get the benefit of all those actives. When you go through the gut, as we demonstrated in a preclinical study done at the University of Mississippi, where they used CBD as the test material for this, they tested in rats, putting CBD in through the stomach and comparing it to putting it in by intravenous injection, where you have it immediately in the bloodstream and get all of it in the bloodstream.
Typically, when people ingest CBD today and chew it up in a gummy or whatever, they'll end up with 6% of the dose actually circulating in their bloodstream, get it through the stomach and then through the liver, where everything has a first-pass metabolism through the liver. To actually get it in the bloodstream where you benefit, only 6% makes it. With our nano-emulsion UltraShear technology enabled, we got 25%, 3-4 times more circulating in the bloodstream. And we showed 80% of it was actually absorbed. The liver metabolism chewed up a lot of it. So it doesn't all get into the circulating bloodstream, but it completely shattered preconceptions about the ability to effectively absorb oil from nano-emulsions at this level of performance.
It tees up that if we go through other routes, like spraying it in the mouth, through the cheek, under the tongue, potentially through the skin and other routes, you avoid that first pass through the liver. So you can get very high levels into the bloodstream. This is much faster and much more effective at delivering the dose that's intended reliably. And that's the exciting breakthrough. And this plays into all kinds of markets, from pharmaceuticals, which will be huge, but they're always slower to move, nutraceuticals and skin care and cosmetics, agrochemicals, lots of food and beverage. So opportunities in multi-billion dollar marketplaces abound for UltraShear. And we have an exciting, unique, patented technology that we think positions us really well for this. I'll turn it back to you, Rick, or to John.
Okay. So we've been working with a number of groups, probably dozens of groups in the cannabis space because of the study that we the marketing study, study three of them, actually, that we published a couple of years ago and a year ago, showing that THC, once it's nano-emulsified, could be felt in an edible in 3-5 minutes. And normally, that's a 45-minute deal, if not longer. And anyone that wants to.
That's an oral spray into the mouth. Edible still goes down into the gut through the stomach, which suffers from those slower absorption constraints, but in an oral spray in the mouth or under the tongue, right?
The oral spray, again, because the THC that's in the oil, the oil droplets are so small, they get absorbed very easily when you're at the level of the capillaries underneath the mouth and in the back of the cheek and things like that. So we've shown that, and we've had a lot of interest from cannabis companies. We've had interest from nutraceutical companies. We've had interest from cosmetics companies. And some of these are mom-and-pop. Some of these are starting development stage. And some of these are multi-billion dollar multinational companies. And we're talking to a number of them. We have close working relationships with a handful of these companies that were developing the products we talked about on the premium products we talked about for Uncle Bud's.
Several of them have come to us recently and said it would be a lot more efficient, a lot more profitable, a lot easier, a lot faster if we sort of merged our efforts, combined our efforts. We have the technology. We have the licenses. They have the raw material. They have the customer base. And you put these together, and the old saying is you get one plus one equaling ten. And so several of them we talked to several over the last two months and said, "Okay, what are you thinking?" And generally, everyone's coming back and saying, "We should form a joint venture where we are able to put the assets that are very valuable from Pressure Bio and from our partner together and make that one plus one equal ten." So we've decided to formalize this.
We've got a handful of companies that we're already talking to about a formal joint venture. We have one in particular that in just a minute, I'll turn it over to John, and John's going to talk about. But first, we want to talk about the joint venture program and kind of why it's so important. I'll lead it off, and then Jeff and John, I'll turn it over to you about the program itself. But number one is what I've already said. It can be a much more efficient, much faster way of getting product, of higher quality product, instead of working with multiple companies and multiple sources of material, we're working with only the best.
In our joint venture program, we're talking to groups that are among the best in their vertical, in their state, if it's a cannabis company or if they're a nutraceutical or cosmetic company, perhaps in the country or even in the world. We are talking with people that you will know the names of when we're able to release it. I'm very, very happy with the first one, which we'll talk about in a minute and how it's grown very quickly in the last 3 or 4 weeks and where we are in it. There's other advantages to having a joint venture. Jeff, you want to take a shot at this?
Sure. Sure. I'll be happy to. I'll just reemphasize the point about the partners. These have ranged from work we've done locally here in California with a local licensed cannabis player that we've used that to develop THC oral sprays at various strengths and conducted consumer testing. The feedback has been dramatic. We're working through flavoring developments and so on with them at the moment and excited about where that will go. In other markets, like the skincare and cosmetic arena, we are literally working with world leader-level companies as well as a leader in the televised sales space that have had their breath taken away by the results of our retinol demonstrations. We see some enormous opportunities. We are tending to work with the smaller companies that are ready to move faster with all the big companies.
It tends to be a much more methodical, slower process, and we want to get to traction quickly. The joint venture program evolution has been very responsive to that, especially with some of these smaller partners. The upfront cost implications of getting the equipment made and dedicated into the activities and so on can be off-putting for them. To facilitate the path forward, a joint venture structure allows both sides to put skin in the game and both sides to participate in the upsides as we hit commercial traction. Very exciting for Pressure Bio to have that direct participation in some of these markets.
Frankly, it allows us to take control of setting the precedents in these markets in terms of very high-quality product positioning and performance and get to demonstrated market traction that others can then get religion and decide to come in and participate and catch up. The benefit of the structure in a joint venture is, one, it allows us to establish an independent entity that is financeable in its own right, unencumbered by any of the challenges or issues of either of the participant companies. We can have a nice, clean, and fast financing funding capability for them. It allows us to both put skin in the game, our equipment and technology, and their customer base and access and expertise and design and formulation of products that serve those markets.
We see this as something that will accelerate our path into both funding and market traction in a variety of different spaces. I'm not sure if there was any other point you were hoping for me to touch on, Rick, but just let me know.
No, that's fine. We're looking for joint ventures in all the areas that we've talked about before: skincare, cosmetics, cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals, and certainly in the nutraceutical category, which is such a big category. There's multiple verticals that one can go into. This is a way for us to work directly with one group in that area. And again, if it is a THC company, we envision being able to perhaps work out an exclusive deal as part of the joint venture with a leading company in that state. And there's 30-some states that allow THC. So there's 30-some potential joint ventures that we can do. It gives us a way to help fund it because it's a separate entity, both the equipment and other things. So we're very excited about it, and we've already started on it, and we're moving along with the first one.
I will just bring John in, but I'll tell my story, which is how this started is my dream, and some people on the phone know this. My dream product has always been, from day one, a very powerful oil-based active ingredient mixture of antioxidants all in one because it would be extremely healthy, extremely good. And it's not something that I know exists anywhere in the world because it's very difficult to get oil-based actives to be absorbed, as we know. And when you're talking about taking some of the top antioxidants in the world and putting them all together, it's a daunting task. But we're on it. And by doing that, by putting this together, John Hollister, who's going to take over for a minute, said, "I know one of the best guys in the world, best companies in the world.
In fact, it's the largest company in the world for selling freeze-dried açaí berry, the largest in the world. I know them personally, and I'll see if there's an interest." John's going to talk about what he's been doing with this company and where we are with him. So John, take it away.
Thanks, Rick. I appreciate that. It's a pleasure to be able to introduce an example of a perfect company for one of these JVs. It's a company called Vita Forte . Vita Forte , as Rick said, is the world's leading producer and distributor of açaí powder, freeze-dried powders. They distribute it around the world to manufacturers who make the final product, and they make final products themselves, as well as they manufacture a number of other organic, healthy powders from different plants. Many of them are oil-soluble plants. They also are the only company that makes freeze-dried coconut water, but they make a whole host and distribute a whole host of different products. They are selling to the nutrient-dense, these super nutrient-dense ingredients to the organic and conventional food world, beverage companies, nutraceutical industries. They are very much like us looking at organic, non-GMO products.
They are kosher-certified distributors of superfoods, fruits, and vegetables. They're super knowledgeable. They sell to big-box stores and companies that sell to big-box stores, and they do it all around the world. They actually are selling into five continents. They are a very important primary source for these materials, which gives us a big advantage. The founder of the company is also very forward-thinking, so they are either certified or licensed with all the kind of leading industry organizations like USDA organic certified, eco-certified. They're part of SQF. They're part of the cosmeceutical certification groups. They really are very remarkable. They are large distributors of Acerola, Guarana, Yerba Mate, and other organic powders and oils. So they were selling somewhere in excess of $20 million per year. And what they bring to us are both their expertise in these areas. They know their customers inside and out.
They're very trusted in the business. That helps us as an organization that has the expertise in making these wonderful nano-emulsions to help accelerate the absorption, the stability that allows you to put it, and the ability to behave like water. It is able to be put into beverages and other products like cosmeceuticals, then can be successfully put on topically and absorbed, which for the consumer, ultimately, is what we're trying to work towards. We want to create better products. Vita Forte, they get it, and they see what we can do to change this industry. I will take a quick step back and say that we've been learning, as have our customers, and we need to educate the market of what the advantages of a nano-emulsion brings both to the manufacturers in this industry but also the consumers.
Because once they learn how much better we can make their products, this market will explode with success because it'll be better for the consumer as well as for these manufacturers in terms of efficiency. But really, frankly, it's from what the products will ultimately do. And Vita Forte is an example of a company that will help us produce this immune booster-based product with a combination of superfoods, if you will, these immune boosters in a product presentation that can then be used in other products. So we're very excited about this, and I hope that's a good introduction for you about one example of multiple different customers.
I think John makes a terrific point that I'll emphasize and generalize, which is this is a technology that offers the opportunity for our partners in each of these fields to literally change the basis of competition in their markets. Everybody is constantly inundated with products and new improved versions and so on. It's an ongoing challenge in all sorts of markets to differentiate yourselves from all the other players competing for their piece. It's rare to have opportunities for true head and shoulders differentiation and literally changing the basis of competition. That's what we're talking about here. In the emulsion space, as people have worked their way down and even talk about their nano-emulsions technology, the other technologies don't show the ability to make these tightly controlled, precise performance-delivering capabilities down in this low nanometer range.
They could get some droplets down there and others that are much larger, and they end up with lower performance capabilities and unstable products that don't have the shelf life and robustness that we bring to this. So this notion of changing the basis of competition, whether we're in a nutraceutical or a cosmetic and skincare and agrochemical and so on, I think is the particularly exciting dimension of what we're doing with UltraShear.
So just to go a little bit further on that, the quality of the nano-emulsion, and part of that is what Jeff has said twice now, which is the size of the droplets. It's not just chopping, shearing droplets down to a small size. It's shearing them all down to a size that's very tight. So they're all almost the same size within a very small percentage of the same size. That's what we do. That's what our patented method does. And the stability we get and the ability to dose we get, we think, we believe, exceeds anything we've seen out there from any other company that is trying to do something similar, whether it's through pressure and shearing like we are or whether it's through some other method like ultrasonics or some other method. We firmly believe that we have the method, and we can scale.
It's like how big do you want to go? And we could go to enormous levels, and we have other ideas of how we do this. So we're very excited about this, but we're excited about this first joint venture. We've tried other ways, and I know many people on the phone remember. We've tried selling licenses to certain companies, and it was very difficult and didn't work because they're basically saying, "I'm buying a license for $1 million or millions of dollars upfront, and I'm not sure how it's going to work." So this joint venture basically allows us to resupply the equipment and the technology and the license and everything we do down the road to make it better. And they're supplying the raw material and the customer base, and we're going to take their already good product and make it better.
If we need to have build financing, we're like any company. We talk to people all day long about financing equipment and financing operations. As a separate organization, it's much cleaner for everyone. It offers a lot of advantages to us. This product, this first product, is what I've dreamed about when I started the—well, not started the company, but when we first came up with UltraShear. This is a product you could name 10, 12, 15 very powerful antioxidants. You've got things like sea buckthorn oil and omega-3, 6, 9. You've got açaí, curcumin, astaxanthin, vitamin E or tocopherol, ubiquinone or coenzyme Q. You've got things like vitamin D3. These are all very powerful in their own right. I take some of these myself one at a time. Imagine putting these all—but they're oil-based.
I know when I take them, I'm only getting 5% or 10%. Imagine putting them all into a spray bottle where they're all in there, and I can spray in my mouth once a day, like the old One-A-Day vitamins. I can do a One-A-Day spray. I can spray 3 or 4 times, whatever it ends up being under my tongue or in the back of my mouth. And I've got all of these antioxidants. Now, we don't know whether it's going to be 4 or 12, but we've already nanoemulsified most of the 12, and individually, they've all worked. We're very excited about individually. Then the next work is, okay, putting them together. Theoretically, they should work. The source of the material is very important, but working with Vita Forte, we know we're getting some of the best material in the world coming in.
So he will be supplying that material. And he also said, "I can't wait to start telling my customer base," which he has hundreds and hundreds of customers throughout the country and throughout the world. And he's selling them a freeze-dried powder that they use. He can't wait to say, "I've added on to my line. We now have a liquid that you might be interested in that we could sell in bulk or we could sell in small vials." So it's very exciting right now to all of us. And it's exciting because it's not just on paper. We're actually working on the joint venture as we speak.
We're working. We spoke with Carlos, the founder that John mentioned the other day, and he gave us his take on what would be good for some of these things if they were to be sold into some of his supermarkets that he has customers or online or into the big-box stores or into companies that he's working with that are developing their own products. So he has a lot of experience, and we're learning from that experience. Not just the immune booster. We're well into this. We've got at least 6-8 of the 12-15 ingredients already nanoemulsified. We've got Carlos and his team helping us out and getting ready for the marketing and sales on the other end. But we also are looking at skincare and what we call what the market calls nootropics.
So I'll spend just a second on skincare and turn it over to Jeff to talk about nootropics. They're not as far along. Skincare, one of the major ingredients, active ingredients, if not the major active ingredient in skincare, anti-aging skincare is retinol. We've already talked for over a year now about, and we've published several press releases on our nanoemulsification of retinol and how well it was received by certain people out there. You can go back and see the press releases and the quotes we have that we had in those press releases. So we've developed a, we're developing a new skincare anti-aging product. In fact, there's three of them. They've already been developed. I personally am going to be using one because my skin is the skin of a guy who's my age, which is not young. And so.
Tomorrow is not the years, Rick.
Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. So that's the guy I ski with, and he knows I can ski like a young guy, but I may look older. But I'm very excited about this because the early results and the early thoughts here are this is going to be extremely effective. It contains a lot of things that others don't have. But most importantly, what they don't have is our nanoemulsion, our ability to nanoemulsify the oil-based ingredients in it, starting with retinol. So this is something that is well underway. We are talking to groups about partnerships that may lead into joint ventures. And this is something that we fully expect will be in commercial use in the second half of this year. The immune booster is also one that we expect and believe will be available in the second half.
We think both of these being available commercially will add to our revenue for the second half of the year. A third one that could add, it's not as far along, but it's an extremely exciting product, especially if you're in your, let's say, 60s or 70s or 80s. It could be a very exciting product for you. Jeff, nootropics?
Sure. What Rick has been describing and in this partner with Vita Forte, it's a perfect example of our objectives in the program in terms of the kind of partner we want that already has existing products, has a stellar reputation in place in the market, has the relationships for the supply of the raw materials from reliable quality leaders with organic, pesticide-free, preservative-free potential formulations, and so on. And getting those kinds of pieces of the puzzle all assembled together is what's important to how we take this forward and maintain the product differentiation and premium quality positioning of the things we're doing. So very exciting to have the Vita Forte example that we've been featuring today. But we are looking at achieving this in other fields, both in cannabis relationships and nootropics and the skincare, as Rick mentioned.
In Nootropics, there are a lot of different kinds of products that can play into this whole cognitive boosting space, whether it's memory boosting enhancement or other aspects of focus and performance and so on. There are a lot of products that are out there today. Everybody probably sees some things that are advertised heavily on television in the memory boosting and cognitive space. The unfortunate truth is when you dig down into what's behind those products, what sort of clinical work has been done, there's shockingly little behind these products other than advertising and paid testimonials. We have been able to identify a leading innovator and player in this market that did the research, frankly motivated by having lost her mother into dementia and realized how little there was to help with this battle. It became a mission thereafter to change those circumstances.
This is a pharmacist, Harvard MBA, that did the work to identify what are the top nutraceutical components out there that affect cognitive performance and memory, and then did the work to dig out where is the real scientific clinical work that has been done on these, what has the science behind it. And then from that, assembled the top 10 actives with real scientific differentiation and documentation behind them, and then identified the top reliable organic quality sources for these products and put them together in a product with the highest dosages available for each of these components to make a product that is really quite powerfully differentiated in the marketplace and has taken that to market both online as well as through partners.
We realized we have an opportunity to take that kind of a differentiated quality leader and move it up yet another important level with our nano-emulsion capability because many of these active components are oil-based. Because they have so much of the high-quality components in there, they do achieve better performance than any other player we've been able to evaluate in this market. But we can reset the bar in the market to a level that, frankly, others won't be able to match. So we're excited about that and have had discussions about emulating a path like we took with Uncle Bud’s and/or using that as a joint venture structure to raise money specifically around it. So we're very excited.
The nootropic area and with the changing demographics of not just North America, but the world in terms of the baby boomer and aging populations and so on that are going to be requiring more and more attention and support, this is an enormous growth area going forward. So very excited to see where we can take that with this structure.
Thanks, Jeff. Last time we spoke, February 5th, I think, I had mentioned people should feel free to send me emails with questions, and I have about 30 questions. We don't have time for 30 questions, but going through them, I'm going to take one, turn one to John, then one to Jeff. We have about 10 minutes left. One question talked about what the writer thought was excessive dilution of shares that we've given out. There was about 33,000 or so shares or 33 million or so shares that were in the 10-K that we for last year that we talked about on the front page.
When the stock goes from $2.50 to $0.25 or even $0.14, it makes it very difficult because some of the lenders that we work with are asking for a certain amount of shares, and it's very difficult to raise money and things like that. So all I can say is that at the current price at 33 million shares, or even if it's double that, if it's fully diluted and add everything in, if it's 60 million shares at $0.14 or $0.15 a share, I personally would say that we're highly undervalued. If you think about what we've just said and what we have and the groups that we're doing, JVs, we're starting with Vita Forte, a $20 million-plus company recognized as one of the best, if not the best, açaí provider in the country, which is such a hot topic right now.
So I believe that the, yeah, I'm not happy that we've gone to 30+ million common shares outstanding, but I do know that in my mind, I believe we're still highly undervalued and that we still are a company that one should look at when they're looking for an investment or a diamond in the rough, as they say. Another question that's come in is talked about advertising and trade journals that, "Why don't we do it?" And they've talked about sales strategy going forward, which we've just touched on. But John is our Director of Sales and Marketing. So John, maybe you want to just take a second to talk about that?
John, you might be on mute.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Rick, thanks for the question and whomever forwarded it. Obviously, with the commercialization of UltraShear and, frankly, other products, a perfect world, we would be doing lots of advertising. To date, in the last few years, we've just been constrained and have not been doing advertising and promotion. We've been doing kind of the old-fashioned way of reaching out and calling. But that's certainly part of the plan. And certainly, one of the benefits of working closely with companies like Vita Forte and others is that they have direct access to channels, and we're not looking, they already know the customers in these marketplaces, which offers us a huge advantage. So that's one aspect of it.
And the second is, as we raise capital, definitely part of the plan is to do more advertising in these targeted spaces to promote these novel products that are just really revolutionary in changing the market, utilizing our capabilities and our partners' expertise in their space, whether it's sourcing of the highest quality materials, but also being able to get to their customers with the relationships that they have in place. So it's a combination of awareness as well as relationship. And so that's the beauty of what we're discussing today, the JVs. So I hope that helps answer the question.
Thanks, John. There's another question. Jeff, you touched on it again, so I don't think you have to spend a lot of time, but let's just make sure that everyone heard your answer. Someone talked about, "We've talked about household names that people would know that we're working with." And household names generally mean it's a big Goliath, a multinational company, and it's saying, "What's going on? What's a holdup? Why aren't there any announcements?
So obviously, as we engage with these companies, they're all very careful and protective of their reputations and careful about what may be announced at any given stage. We have been able to share some insights in the past in the press releases. But as an example, in the retinol and skincare arena, we did disclose that we were working with and had provided retinol for testing and evaluation to the leading supplier or leading seller of skincare products on QVC, a company that had sold $500 million worth of products through QVC over a 20-year period, $500 million. Deep, deep experience in this field and provided the feedback that this was head and shoulders differentiated in terms of the skin tightening capabilities over any products ever evaluated by them. We have shared that with one of the world's leading suppliers in the skincare arena.
That led to them not only being very impressed with their assessment of that product, but then coming back to us with a challenge of, "Well, here's something, another very important ingredient that is our most difficult product from an emulsification or nanoemulsification potential point of view." And they had signed a Material Transfer Agreement, entered into an evaluation agreement with us, and we were able to demonstrate our ability to nanoemulsify that successfully. So that has been a very positive trajectory, and we anticipate that continuing to go forward. And as it does, we should cross the threshold. We will be able to share a press release with the name of this leading player in the nutraceutical space.
Rick, you may have to refresh me as to whether or not we have released a name publicly previously or not, but we have been working repeatedly with a top leader, I believe the world leader in astaxanthin, and also a company that was very impressed with those results. astaxanthin is the most potent antioxidant in the marketplace today. It is 6,000 times more potent than vitamin C and a very desirable ingredient. Go ahead, John.
No, it's Rick. I need to hop in because we got one minute left. So I wanted to touch one more thing, and then we'll be finished. There was a question about why no news. I know some people called me and some people emailed and said they're upset because there's been no news. The advice we were given by counsel is because we are late in filing, we should not be out there seemingly promoting the company at a time when we're late in our 10-K filing. So this is why this conference call was held off until after we filed the 10-K. So it was on advice of counsel that once we miss the cutoff of the 30th of March, we should not be out there highlighting the company in press releases or even going to conferences and things.
So that's what we've done. So it's now 5:30 P.M.
I think we should add to that, Rick, that that does not constrain us from being able to discuss with interested parties under NDA. And as people see what's ahead in the joint venture arena and those discussions and potential financing activity, we are not out to promote anything like that through a call like this, but interested parties absolutely can reach out to the company. We'll execute an NDA and talk in more depth about those opportunities and about some of the details behind the big news items that we've been alluding to.
Yeah. And there are a number under an NDA with an investor. We can disclose who we're talking with, how far we've gone, a number of things that we can't do on a call like this. So sure, anybody that wants to learn more about any of these things we talked about today can call me, get an NDA signed, and then talk with me, John, or Jeff, or all three of us about that. So I just want to thank everybody for taking their time today. We always try to keep it to an hour. We're now 1 minute over. So I thank everybody for coming on. We expect that we will now be able to start putting out more news, and we're anxiously looking at trying to get back to compliance and then staying there forever, at least for as long as I'm with the company.
Thanks to everybody. John, we're all set. If you want to end the call, we're all set.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
Thank you.
Yep. Thanks.