Good day, everyone, welcome to the Pressure BioSciences Second Quarter 2023 Investor Call and Business Update. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and time permitting, we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Richard Schumacher, President and Chief Executive Officer of Pressure BioSciences. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Matthew, and welcome everybody to the PBIO second quarter financial review and business update. As always, we'll 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 any such statement may be based.
For the agenda today, first of all, I am pleased to welcome back, to our call, the company's Chairman of the Board, Jeff Peterson. Jeff, welcome.
Hi, Rick. Hello, everybody. Glad to join you again.
For today's meeting, we're gonna start with a brief discussion of the 2023 second quarter financial results. Of course, those were published last night and again today in a press release, so we don't need to spend time going through them by the number, but we certainly will talk to them and talk about them. Then we're gonna highlight some of the operational and technical successes that we achieved during both the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2023, as well as some of our goals and expectations for the rest of the fiscal year 2023 and after, and as part of our general business update. Afterwards, we'll answer a handful of questions that have been sent to Jeff and me with a request that we address them on today's call.
After that, if time is remaining, we'll be pleased to open up the phone lines and take a few questions live. For the financial review, I'm going to discuss the second quarter, and I'm also going to discuss not only second quarter compared to the second quarter of last year, but also the first two quarters of this year. Basically, it was a good second quarter. We had, as you recall, a much better first quarter, a record first quarter. This was a record quarter for our two quarters, quarter one and quarter two. But it was a good quarter, both financial but particularly on an operational and technical basis.
Our total revenue, our instrument sales, our consumable sales, and PBI Agrochem sales were all higher in Q2 2023 than they were in Q2 2022. It goes without saying that we're disappointed that we had no UltraShear revenue in the second quarter. We had intense focus during the first and second quarter of this year on the planned launch before the end of the quarter. We did launch around the 23rd of May, our UltraShear Processed Nano-CBD Topical Spray. Very happy that we were able to get that out, and I know a number of people on the phone call today have already purchased that spray and have already seen how well it works.
We knew it was gonna be a tough quarter to get UltraShear sales in Q2, but as mentioned in today's press release, and certainly on the last conference call, we fully expect to post strong UltraShear revenue in Q3 and Q4 of 2023. It also remains our goal to have at least 1 quarter with greater than $1 million in revenue in 2023. It's our goal for 1 of the next 2 quarters to be over $1 million in revenue. It also remains a goal for next year to have our first quarter ever, where we have each month in the quarter, $1 million in revenue. These are lofty goal-goals, but we can, we can hit them. We feel and believe that we can hit them. We've got a tiger by its tail.
We are clearly very happy with the performance of our UltraShear Nano-CBD topical spray. We'll be releasing an oral spray later this year, perhaps in September, and we're excited about that. The data to date's been extremely good. Between the two of them, the topical and the oral spray, we do believe that it's possible that we could take our sales, which are generally about $2.5 million per year, and eclipse that in just 1 quarter next year, to do about $1 million a month per quarter next year, at least once, if not more often. Very excited about that. It's gonna be driven by UltraShear.
We've talked about that in the previous meetings here on the phone, investor meetings, and in some of the comments we've made, we've talked about that for quite some time, certainly for the for the all of 2023 so far. I think there's two things on the financial highlights of the second quarter that I'd like to point out. The first is that our cash burn continues to be decreased. We're very cognizant of our cash burn. We're very cognizant of, of needing to put that cash totally towards the use of getting the UltraShear platform out and working. We're spending 90% roughly of all of our efforts in UltraShear.
So between the efforts and, and the cash that's going into it, we've been able to make very good headway, both technically and in expanding our, our distributor base. We'll talk about that, too. But most importantly, or just as importantly, we've reduced the cash burn from operations. In the first quarter, we talked about it, it was a 44% decrease year-over-year from the first quarter of last year, 2022, to where we were just around $422,000 in the first quarter. In the second quarter of this year, we've decreased our cash burn year-over-year from last year, about 28%. Overall, we've decreased our cash burn for the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2022.
We went from $2 million in cash needed for operations in 2022 to $1.3 million in 2023, and that's about a 35% decrease. It reduces the amount of cash that we need to either borrow or dilute by selling equity. We've been, still been able to make good headway in both the technical and the operational areas of UltraShear in particular. A lot of it's come out of our BaroFold and our PCT. We're still working in those areas, but we're minimizing our efforts in those areas, taking care of our customers, which is so important, but not working on anything new in those two areas right now as we put all 90% of our efforts into UltraShear.
Very happy to say that the cash burn has decreased tremendously over the first half of this year. In the press release that went out today, Jeff, who's with us, mentioned a few things. Jeff, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask, if you could maybe take over the podium here and talk about several of the things that you mentioned, today in the press release.
Sure, Rick. I think one of the things that we were particularly pleased about is a great deal of our attention has been focused on restructuring of the balance sheet and on our path to being able to complete an uplist to NASDAQ or NYSE at the earliest opportunity. In the course of this, one of our major long-term investors, during the second quarter, agreed to convert $10 million of debt into preferred stock, and that obviously has a very significant beneficial impact on the balance sheet and is an important stepping stone toward our intended uplist efforts. We anticipate that a significant amount of additional debt position is also positioned to convert to equity as we complete financing efforts associated with uplisting.
We're, we're pleased with the positive progress and how pieces of that puzzle continue to align for us. As part of these efforts, I would just comment that the board has continued to put some strong attention on strategic opportunities that could help accelerate us, either looking at non-core assets that we could divest and help create some funding to assist that path. Or looking at some strategic merger acquisition roll-up opportunities that would be accretive, but importantly, would be strongly leveraged by the impact of our UltraShear platform.
The UltraShear platform, as I think our audience has been learning over many months now, is a transformational technology that will be game changing, in our view, in a wide variety of industries, from food and beverage, to nutraceuticals, to cosmeceuticals, agrochemical, pharmaceuticals, and other areas. The ability to take an oil base or oil-soluble active molecule, whether that's a nutraceutical, you know, like astaxanthin, the leading antioxidant in the world, or retinol in a skincare product, or a wide variety of other products across the markets I've mentioned. Obviously, cannabis is one that we have looked at. THC, CBD, and various other cannabinoids are all getting a lot of attention in different applications, and they're all oil-based actives.
For our water-based biology to absorb them, we have to get these into tiny enough droplets of oil that our bodies can rapidly absorb the active molecules out of those droplets. Doing that and avoiding undesired chemicals for undesired damage to the product by competitive processes is highly desirable. The UltraShear technology has been showing some, some truly revolutionary capabilities in being fast-acting, fast-absorbing, much more effective payload or dose delivery. We're very excited about the initial progress being demonstrated, about some preclinical study results that should be released, results we've also been generating in consumer testing. I'm excited about that, and I think the path continues to be bright.
Thanks, Jeff. The last part of this, before we get to some questions, we wanted to go over some of the operational and technical highlights. Jeff touched on a couple of them, but they're in today's press release, and they're in the Q, and they've come out, most of them have come out as press releases during the quarter. The first one relates to the UltraShear nano CBD commercial rollout. When we did this around the 23rd, 24th of May, we had 4 distributors, and they each had a number of retail outlets. Some of them were brick and mortar, and some were selling it through e-commerce or both.
We started out with a very deliberate and conservative you know, expansion of our of our commercialization. We had these four groups, and it took about, I don't know, six or seven weeks, and we felt comfortable that we were covering all the bases and that everything was working well. We announced about four weeks ago that we were gonna enter into a phase 2. A phase 2 is a much more rapid expansion. Three weeks after that, which was last week, we announced that we had more than doubled our distribution network. It was gone from four to nine, and that we had received around $300,000 in orders that are to be shipped over the coming over the rest of the year.
Much of it will be shipped before, much before the end of the year. We're working on additional, and we told everybody at the time, "Expect to see us add additional distributors." We're a business-to-business company. We don't sell the final product. We make the product, and we either sell it in vials, in which a customer will put its label on it, we label it, and sell it as their branded product, or we will sell them a bulk material. It could be a liter, it could be, 1,000 liters, that they will then dispense into their own vials and label them and sell them. We don't wanna compete against our own customers. Our goal is to have 100 distributors by this time next year.
We initially said 50, but with the rate we're going, we've now increased that by saying around this time next year, by next Labor Day, we hope to have 100. That's 100 distributors. Each distributor has 1, 2 dozens or even multiple dozens of retail outlets that are gonna be selling to selling the product out. So we're very excited about that because 1 distributor could mean a dozen, 2 dozen, or even 5 dozen retail outlets that will be selling it to hundreds, dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of customers. We're gonna get it out there. Our goal is to get to a number 420 end retail outlets. More about that later. We're putting something together to put out in a press release.
Why, why 420? Why is that important, and what does that mean to us? That will be out soon, but that's the magic number to us, is 420 endpoint retail outlets that will be selling it. Again, those, those retail outlets could be selling to dozens, hundreds of, of customers. We think we can get to that within a year. It- get to that number, and we think that the number of distributors themselves will be between 50 and 100, and we're shooting for 100. We now have nine. We are working on a handful more, and, and once those are under contract, we'll, we'll be looking for even more.
I think every week or two, you could expect to hear from us about adding on to the distribution network, because that's how we're gonna be selling the product. It's not just one product. By the time we get to, let's say, the end of September, October first, we hope to have the oral spray product out, as well as the topical. We've had tremendous responses on the, on the topical. That is accelerating. We also had a press release out, very interesting. I've been following this story for a couple of years. I've been seeing things in the news about people using CBD. It needs to be nano CBD. It needs to be able to be absorbed into produce, fruits, and vegetables, to slow down the ripening.
I've seen pictures of strawberries in 15 days. I... Everybody on the call probably knows what strawberries look like. We buy them in the store or at the market. Five days later, if they're not eaten, they're, they're, they're pretty grungy. I've seen pictures of strawberries that were 15 days old, that had been sprayed with different coatings, and if it's a natural coating, like a nano CBD, they've shown... I've seen pictures of 15 days where it looked like it was bought that day. So, very excited about this because we believe that we have the best method, delivery method to make nano CBD in the world right now. We have reasons, many reasons to believe that.
If, and if it's a, a CBD product, nano CBD product, that can slow down the ripening and give you a much longer term, a 2 or 3 times the shelf life for, for fruits and vegetables, that's something we're very excited about and we, and we're looking into. Jeff, you mentioned, you mentioned the key academic publication, that is, we believe coming out. We, we, we were told it was submitted a few weeks ago. And we, we believe that the data are gonna be very compelling. The, this is a, an academic publication that's based on an animal model, that looks at how well our nano CBD, that is processed using UltraShear, how well it's absorbed in the animal, how quickly it's absorbed, and how quickly it gets to 100% absorbance.
We believe the data will be extremely compelling. We are waiting on the edge to see this come out, because we believe that it's going to show our nano CBD made by UltraShear in the best light possible. Jeffrey, you already talked about it. You want to add something to that, please?
Yeah. I will expand a little bit around that and, and perhaps explain a little more clearly some of our excitement about the topical applications for nanoemulsions. We've specifically, of course, been recently focused on CBD and THC applications with partners. Although, we certainly have been doing work in other areas, a couple of that I mentioned, astaxanthin and retinol, that have both come back with some remarkable early results in the hands of external evaluators. Just talking about the CBD, and, and I'll specifically talk about THC, in that I, I think so many people can, can relate to this. you know, THC for consumers, whether it's for recreational use or, or other purposes, THC has traditionally been consumed in, in one of two primary modes.
You're either inhaling it, smoking it, or vaping it. The big drawback of that is the long-term health impact to the lungs and more broadly beyond that. The concern about health impact in the lungs is the number one limiting factor on the inhalation side. A lot of folks don't care for all the equipment and stuff that is necessary and various other aspects of messiness and so on. The health impact, of course, is the leading issue. To avoid that, there's been a tremendous amount of consumption via the gastrointestinal tract, eating various forms of THC products. The fundamental problems associated with that are the slow response. The issue is, if you're ingesting it, it takes a while to get down into the stomach to get absorbed.
Even after you absorb it, the, the thing that so many people, I think, just aren't aware of, is the fact that everything going into your bloodstream from the gastrointestinal tract is routed directly into the liver. It doesn't go directly from the GI tract into your circulating bloodstream. It goes directly into the liver, where it encounters what is called first pass metabolism. Your liver gets a chance at chopping up and reducing the various nutrients and other inputs that it's received from the GI tract as the very first step. That is so efficient in the case of THC, to use that example, that the actual amount of circulating product, whether we're talking about THC or CBD, in the bloodstream...
If you, if you look up Wikipedia and look at results for CBD, you'll, you'll see a 5%, 6% bioavailability number. That's just in, you know, Wikipedia. You'll certainly see that in all kinds of scientific publications in that area. What that's telling you is no matter how efficiently you've absorbed it through the gut, the liver has reduced it to metabolites so efficiently that you're only getting 5% or 6% of that CBD or THC circulating in the bloodstream. The alternative of a topical product that you can spray into the cheek or under the tongue, not accumulating it to be swallowed and go through the gastrointestinal tract, but actually penetrate straight through the skin, or in many cases, just applying it to the skin.
Certainly, in the pain management arena, that's being done a lot with CBD and THC products as well. By spraying directly into the cheek and under the tongue, you have the ability to get very fast absorption through the skin and very effective payload delivery. We can tell from the studies that were done in rats, that Rick mentioned, that the actual absorption efficiency is extremely high. It's just the first-pass metabolism in the liver that is reducing the effective amount in the bloodstream. If we bypass that and go through the cheek, under the tongue, or potentially through the skin, the efficiency of delivering a dose, whether it's THC, CBD, or a wide variety of other products that may follow that, is enormously increased.
We saw in some 50 patients answering questionnaires, which I shouldn't say patients, 50 consumers answering questionnaires as we did testing on THC oral spray formulations. They were seeing first effects in many cases in a minute or less, in most cases, in three to five minutes, in a small number of cases closer to 10 minutes. Nonetheless, when you compare that to gastrointestinal tract, where people are waiting 45, 60 minutes to get first effects, and then where they become frustrated by the lack of effects, take more and, you know, find themselves a couple hours later wondering why they're on the floor. It's a story that I think so many have heard, if not experienced over the years.
The opportunity to have very fast action in an oral spray and a very high effective dose delivery happening, then within typically 15 to 30 minutes, is a complete paradigm shift, and it's something we expect to affect many different markets. As it happens, the cannabis market is one that's been an effective tool, where people can relate to experiences personally and, and understand the difference in mechanism.
Thanks, Jeff. Jeff touched on it. One, the last technical highlight and operational highlight I wanted to mention was the study. We had about 65 consumers in 3 different focus groups take our, take a THC product that had been processed using UltraShear. It's not our product, it's a product that's been made using UltraShear, and these are done in California and where Jeff is, and people have been using THC for a while, and producing and processing THC. We had a small instrument which they, we brought into the company and taught them how to use it, and they made a terrific THC product, a spray product.
As one of my fraternity brothers told me at a reunion just in May of this... June of this year, he said, "Rick, I need to take a gummy every night to sleep, and I only want to take 3 or 4 milligrams. I don't want to get high. I just want to get relaxed, and I got to take it 45 minutes before I go to bed.
If I forget, then I don't go to bed for another 45 minutes. He said, "So you'd be have -- you'd have a winner if you could close that window between the immediate effects of THC when you smoke or vape it, versus the effects when you take it as an edible," like a spray or, or a gummy of usually, for him, 45 minutes, and for many people, 30-60 minutes. So, material was made using our UltraShear, and the studies were done by an independent third-party group, and what they found was astounding. What they found is that, that, as Jeff alluded to, the vast majority, between 3 and 5 minutes, were feeling the effect, some in 1 minute, some in 8 or 9 minutes.
Usually, those are the people that had to take many, many milligrams. We're looking at a very fast-acting THC because of just the reasons Jeff laid out. It was getting into the bloodstream extremely quickly versus the normally a much, a much longer and slower route because it was a spray that they made that was being sprayed under the tongue or in the cheeks, and it was getting to the bloodstream almost, almost instantaneously, and people were feeling it within three to five minutes. We are talking to a number of people about that. THC is a little more difficult because every state has its own rules. We'd have to bring machines into every state. We are talking to multi-state operators, and we're talking to individual companies.
CBD is a lot easier because we can do that here in Massachusetts and ship it. Jeff is busy working on developing the, the capabilities to do, to do some of this also in California, as we've mentioned over a year ago, about having a bicoastal, having both East and West Coast, available to our customers. That's all I wanted to go through there. I, I do have a bunch of questions, and that I wanted to attack. Some of them we already have, Jeff, as you can see from the list that you had. One of them that comes up, I'm not going to say a lot, but it's come up a lot lately, which is the value of our intellectual property, particularly our patents. We have 39 issued patents....
8 of them are already issued in the area of UltraShear. There's 17 more pending in UltraShear. There's 39 total. Especially if it's not UltraShear, which we have some very strong patents, we have strong patents in the other two areas, PCT and BaroFold. I'd say particularly in BaroFold, since that's a newer technology that we acquired back in 2017. We have some very good patents. In a previous life, I've had, I've hired people to look at patent estates and come back. It's not cheap, not even close to being cheap.
I said in a press release, just 2 weeks ago, my personal opinion is that I believe that these patents are worth much more than our market cap, and much more than our enterprise value. That's my own personal opinion, based upon 50 years of being in the business, that these patents are worth a lot. We're looking at the possibility of getting them looked at by a group that could appraise them, and the appraisal would be held up by others who would believe in that appraisal. I believe that that appraisal, again, will come in at multiples of our current value.
We're working on it now, more, more later, but we'd like to get that done sooner than later, if we can find someone of good reputation that can do it for a reasonable price. You know, Rick, I might...
Yep.
Uh-
Jump on some points you made there as well. I was going to circle back around to this later anyway, but, you know, I, I'll say I, I'm a little self-conscious, you know, when we spend all the time that we have on, just even on this call, talking about cannabis, because it's certainly not a cannabis-centric company in terms of our overall focus and strategy. Within the UltraShear area, we have vastly larger opportunities across so many other, you know, market sectors outside of it. Cannabis has been a very convenient vector for demonstration for us and where people can relate to personal experiences and so on.
I mean, to, to give a sense of that, you know, without divulging the specifics, you know, we've, we've, as an example, have had the president of a, a $40 billion multinational company, not only, you know, make the effort to have initial meetings with, Rick, at a conference, but then to, come to Pressure Bio outside of Boston and spend hours to meet the team, get acquainted with the technology, and literally stopped a clinical trial and was getting started in order to get, UltraShear treated product into that clinical trial. You know, this, this is just 1 example of the, the kind of impact and import that, this technology can have.
This was in a nutraceutical type of application, but we expect this to be game changing, again, in cosmeceuticals, agrochemical, and beyond. I'm excited about that. You know, even in the historical segments, where, again, we have significant patent estate and traction already, in PCT, the audience may recall our announcement of a major Chinese distributor earlier this year, with a commitment for 16 PCT machines, several of which, you know, have been built and delivered already and more remain for the rest of this year. We have a new distributor in India that is getting started, and we're flying out to...
I shouldn't say we, not Rick and I, but we, we have the first install about to be accomplished by a member of our team in India, coming up here very quickly. We expect that to proceed into again, a significant growth sector for the established PCT business. In the BaroFold area, which is unfolding and refolding proteins, which is critical in the biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing processes. We've had a number of programs going on with some key partners, from Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations to biopharma companies with, you know, specific needs to be addressed internally.
Again, we are responding to requests to quote in that area now, with, and getting indications of desires to put BaroFold facilities into literally more than 2 dozen sites, potentially. You know, these are the other dimensions of what it continues to develop with excitement in the business, and I think it's helpful for folks to feel a little bit of that flavor.
Jeff, you mentioned big companies. That's one of the questions we were asked to comment on and one of the points asked to comment on. It basically, to summarize what I was sent, it said that, you know, over the years, multiple people have asked, "Why haven't we landed a big contract? Why aren't we working on big company contracts?" I can assure you, we are. We've already talked about one already, roughly a $40 billion company. We have another one that's about a $7 billion company. We've had other companies that were in between those two numbers that we've worked with and plan to work with again. My answer has been unchanged all along, having done this for 50 years.
Almost without exception, when you start working with a company that big, as a small company, they put you through the wringer, and they ask many things of you that maybe a bigger company has the money and wherewithal and staff to do. A small company, when I say a small company, even a company under 500 people, Small Business Association, definition of a small company, under 500 people, may not be able to do all of that. Quite frankly, it's often not even necessary. It's just icing on the cake. So it gets very difficult to work with big companies. You can go out of business trying to get land a big company.
Our business plan all along has been: Let's go after the smaller, more nimble companies that we can turn into customers very quickly. Let's always have several bigger companies, because when you land them, everybody knows it. We are working, and I was ecstatic when the CEO of this $40 billion company called, or his local guy, in the U.S. called and said, "Could we come in and visit you? We'll only be there half an hour." I said, "That's all right. You can be here as long as you want." They stayed for two and a half hours.
We are working with big companies, we are making headway, we're also working with a lot of smaller companies, we're certainly making headway because we've already announced 5 new distributors of our, of our 1 product. We've mentioned to everybody, be, be aware that, that others will be mentioned and signed up pretty soon. We are working with big and with small, I hope that answers the question, whoever sent this in. Most of these were put together by several people out there, IR people that we use and sent in a bunch of questions. Another one talks about, we had a press release about Isiah Thomas, about Adrienne Denese, 2 different press releases with Isiah Thomas, who's an NBA All-Star.
They have a company called One World Products. I can tell you, it is one really exciting company. If you don't know it, you should look it up. One World Products, they're on the OTCQB, I believe. Isiah and Ken there have done a great job of fighting the battle we all fight as small companies on the OTC market, and they're making headway. I spoke with Ken within the last five days, and we are still talking about how we can work together. We spent a good half hour, maybe 40 minutes, on the phone, I believe it was Sunday night, talking about how we can make one plus one equal ten between us, and I believe we can. That is certainly far from dead. Dr.
Adrienne Denese is, is, the, the, the, the number 1 seller of, of, anti-aging skincare on QVC, in the history of QVC, 20 years, $500 million. We've been talking a lot with Adrienne Denese and her team, and we are working on what we said we're gonna work on. We said we're gonna work on a retinol-based product that she could come out, she calls the next generation of skincare, of anti-aging skincare. We're still working. I know there hasn't been any, any news out there, but I can assure you that in the, in the past, 48 hours, 72 hours, we've spoken with people in both organizations.
We intend to continue to do that, and we intend to, to, to work with them as partners, eventually, in products that are on, on the market.
I might, I might add.
Yep.
On the work with Adrienne Denese that, as I think I had mentioned earlier, retinol is, is the, skin-tightening ingredient that is, used in, in many different, anti-aging formulations. That was the, the test vehicle that we ran through UltraShear, for Adrienne Denese and, and provided samples back. Of course, they have, a standard testing protocol, for products like this. It was, you know, I think, shocking, for her and then delightful for us to hear the feedback that she had never in her career seen skin-tightening results, at the level that the UltraShear retinol produced.
Thanks, Jeff. Two more things. One is we've mentioned recently in a couple of press releases, we've had a number of employees who are upset because we're we have so much going on that our lawyers continue to tell us that we're in a, we're in a blackout period, both on, at the board level and at the company level, and so we can't be in there buying stock. We started about 1 month ago, and pulling together everything we need to set up an employee stock purchase plan. It's sort of like a 10-to-5, so that employees will be able to participate and be able to to buy, to buy stock. Several employees came to me and said, "I thought it was cheap when we were at $2.25 just 6 months ago.
This is crazy, Rick. Could you hurry up and get this plan going? We're doing everything we can to, to get this in, installed here. Any employee that would like to can participate in the stock purchase plan from their automatic deduction from their payroll. The last question I have, and we've covered most of these, this one has to do with dilution of shares, and it's, it's a bit complex and complicated, but what I can say is that we have a, we have an anti-dilution clause in a deal that we did 6 years ago, 9.5 years ago, that, that doesn't allow us to sell stock directly out of the company for under $2.50 a share.
Otherwise we, we have to allow millions of shares to be, or notes that apply to millions of shares to convert at that lower price. That would be a heavy hand of dilution. What we've done is we've done a lot of notes that will convert at $2.50 a share. That's how we've gotten by this way for a number of years. It makes it very difficult when, when the stock is at $2. Jeff and I were pretty successful in bringing people in, even though they were paying up a bit because they, they saw the value. When you're, you know, below $1, it's or even below $1.50, it makes it much more difficult, if not almost impossible.
We, we continue to look at debt as an instrument that can bring money in, bring capital in to help us commercialize this amazing technology of UltraShear. In doing so, you know, we've added a lot of debt to the balance sheet. As Jeff mentioned earlier, our largest investor agreed to in the first quarter, to convert $10 million into of debt into equity. In the second quarter, once we got the preferred stock effectuated through the State of Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the person did do the conversion, and you'll see it. You'll see $10 million less of debt on the balance sheet.
Jeff and I both believe that there are multiple other investors who have so much to gain by having this stock go in the opposite direction of where it's gone for the last six months, that we believe there'll be other people that will be willing to convert their debt to equity. I will say that the equity that this number 1 investor converted into was a preferred stock, and as such, it's not tradable on the market. I've had some people say: "Is the person who converted $10 million selling?" The answer is, as far as I can tell, no, because the person converted into preferred stock, and they have not converted the preferred stock into common stock, so it'd be very difficult for them to sell.
Plus, Jeff and I know this person very well, and this is a person that, a terrific shareholder, somebody that deserves to make a very good return on their investment, been very strongly supportive of us over the years and doing things like this, converting the debt to equity. We're indebted to this investor. This is not the investor who would be selling. This is an investor, who is doing everything he can to help us out, in our opinion. That's, that's it. I, I got a notice here from... We're supposed to have 45 minutes, and we've had 52, so I know that, we need to summarize and then, and get on with things.
Jeff, I'm gonna do a summary, but any, any last things that you'd like to do before I do my summary?
I think we've hit most of the points. I, I'll just say that we remain excited and confident about the path forward here with UltraShear. The positive activities going on in our traditional product areas in PCT and BaroFold are very heartening and encouraging as well. As Rick made clear at the beginning, you know, 90% plus of our focus and attention is on UltraShear. We're delighted at the trend line in new partnerships, new distributors, that are off and running with our activities in the cannabis area, not to mention larger strategic programs outside of cannabis. I think we're quite excited and optimistic about navigating the rest of the path as we try to move into an uplist to Nasdaq or NYSE at the earliest opportunity.
Thanks, Jeff. For me, I can, the first thing I wanna say is that I take everything that this company does personally. I'm the founder of the company. I'm the guy that lay in bed 20 years ago and said: "I wonder if we could start a company using this incredible power of nature, pressure, and can we do it?" Can we change the world? The answer is, we did it, and yes, we can change the world. There's no doubt.
I know that in my life, my first company, Boston Biomedica, has saved millions of lives, and the 300 people that joined me after I started it, I commend them because the products that we came out with made blood bank testing and hospital testing for infectious disease far superior to what it was at that time. Many people, thousands, tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, did not get transfusions of blood or blood products because our products said, "No way. There's something wrong here. Do not transfuse that blood. Go back and retest." I feel like this technology we have is just as strong. I actually feel it's stronger. This is a platform. This is a platform technology that we own the patents for. We've proven it.
When the peer review journal article comes out, which we think will happen in a matter of days or weeks, we hope so, that it will help prove it. And the data we've already pre-presented has helped prove that UltraShear works. We have 8 issued patents. We have 17 more coming. We can take any oil-based, active ingredient, and we can make it more absorbable. We haven't found one yet that hasn't become more bioavailable, more stable, more essentially water soluble. And all we're doing is touching the proverbial tip of the iceberg. We're looking at a technology that has a reach that goes into everything from nutraceuticals. Think about the hundreds of nutraceuticals that are out there, that people spend billions of dollars a year, and yet, as Jeff pointed out, all of these things are probably in the 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% level of bioavailability.
They're not getting into the circulating blood the way they should. They're not being able to help us the way that we expect them to help us when we spend that money. Billions of dollars in nutraceuticals, whether it's curcumin or astaxanthin or vitamin D3, or any vitamin A, or any vitamin D, any vitamin K, any vitamin E, any of the supplements, all of these can be made better. They can be made higher quality through UltraShear technology, the technology that our company owns. We also can do the same for cosmetics and cosmeceuticals. We can do the same for agrochemicals. We can do the same in food and beverage. We can make beverages that are clean label, where you don't have to use preservatives.
You can use the methods that we own to help, extend the shelf life so that without having to use chemical additives, we've already proven that. Then when you look at pharmaceuticals, my gosh, the, the, the world is our oyster in pharmaceuticals. 44% of all new drugs are in oil. How do we get that out? How do we get that compound out and into our system as efficiently as possible? With UltraShear. That's how we do with UltraShear. We have a technology that can change the world more than we changed the world at Boston Biomedica. It's so exciting. It's been tough because as a small company that's undercapitalized, it makes it very difficult, to fund everything, but we're getting it done, and, we have a number of things that are going on.
We're talking to, we're talking to companies that we think want to partner with us, and obviously, we mention along the way that we're looking for strategic investments. Jeff, in his quote today, talked about, you know, non-core assets that have very much a lot of value that we're looking at. We've actually had people come to us and say, "If 90% of your business is in this group, in this area, what about the other? Do you have any interest in licensing or selling off some of those assets to us?" When you start looking at different ways of non-dilutive finance, believe me, they're, they're in the tips of our, of our mind every single day. We're excited about what we have. We know we can change the world in multiple areas.
We know we have to focus, which is what we're doing, and we know we need your help. We need the help of our shareholders. Again, thank you for those of you who have stuck with us this time and this, this very tough time in the last few months, where the stock has gone in the wrong direction, and we don't understand why, and we just know that this company is worth multiples. In our opinion, it's worth multiples of what the value is, whether it's the enterprise value, or, or, or the market cap. We, we believe we're worth multiples, and our goal is to show people. We need to show them that, that this is the real McCoy. This is it. That's what we're gonna do. Appreciate everybody's help. Appreciate everybody sticking with us.
I appreciate you taking time today, and we, we think we're gonna have one heck of a second half of this year. We've already said our goal is to do $1 million on one of the quarters, and we had a record quarter, the first quarter, at $700+ thousand, so we've got a ways to go to hit $1 million, but UltraShear can get us there. UltraShear, it's just now, one of our good bankers keeps saying, "Rick, it's been linear. You've laid the foundation and it... And the steps are going up and up and up." He can now see how it's leading towards profitability and leading towards a bang-up company. So that's what we're about to show. We feel it in our bones.
We appreciate everybody. We look forward to talking with you in November, when we talk about our third quarter numbers. Matthew, thank you very much. I think we've used up exactly the 1 hour you gave us.
Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.