Okay, I think we're ready to get started. Before we do kick it off, again, for those of you just coming on, we are going to take audience questions and utilize the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen, and we will get to those at the conclusion. I wanna thank everyone for joining today as we host Pressure Bio. I'm going to now turn this over to Pressure Bio CEO, Rick Schumacher. Thank you.
Thanks, Callie. First of all, I wanna thank everybody for joining us. I know it's right before the big holiday and some people are probably getting ready to leave, and others are working very hard to make sure that they can get a three-day holiday in. Thanks for joining us. Alex and I are gonna do our best to come in on time, if not finish before one o'clock. Let me begin. We are a company located a little bit south of Boston. We're primarily an equipment company. All of our equipment depends on three different technology platforms. We're gonna talk only about one of them today, because it, number one, is by far the most exciting of the three right now.
Although all three are exciting, this one, Ultra Shear, is the most exciting right now. We're gonna spend the vast majority of our time, which is about a half hour, going through some slides and talking about Ultra Shear Technology. Alex. Before we begin, I need to remind everybody that we are a publicly traded company. We're on the OTC with the symbol PBIO, so please, as always, do due diligence before thinking of investing in a public company. Very briefly, myself, I'm a scientist turned into a business guy. I spent 13 years at Harvard Medical School doing research. I'm primarily a virologist. I was deeply into HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C during the 1980s and 1990s. I've started now four companies.
After I left Harvard, I started a company called Boston Biomedica, which we took to NASDAQ, BBII. I also co-founded an anti-HIV drug discovery company called Panacos Pharmaceuticals, a NASDAQ company, PANC. I helped an Irish company, Trinity Biotech, TRIB, still in existence, do a public offering. I was in the founding group. I'm the founder of Pressure BioSciences. Excuse me. I'm gonna ask Alex to, when I turn the baton over to him, he can do a much better job giving you a 30-second overview of his incredible background. Dr. Ting is the Head of Engineering. He's been with me since 2006. Same with Alex.
His background, he mainly is a pioneer in using high pressure in the food area to make food safer, cleaner, clean label, minimize or get rid of the needs for adding chemicals. John Hollister joined us recently in the last two years, and he's Director of Sales and Marketing. We have a terrific board led by Jeff Peterson, who has a bachelor's and master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT. Because of that, he is also a source of information and a sounding board for us for a lot of things that we do. Sasha. As I mentioned, everything that we do, we develop instruments.
We have three technology platforms, Pressure Cycling Technology or PCT, where we have 350 instruments, roughly, and about 225 customers all around the world. Many of these are key opinion leaders. We basically use pressure to break apart cells to release those amazing molecules, RNA, DNA, protein, and lipids and other small molecules to help develop new therapies, new diagnostics. The customers we have are just a terrific list of customers that are well-recognized by everybody on this webinar, I believe. BaroFold is a second technology that we have. We acquired this about four years ago. We basically are able to use pressure to fold and unfold proteins for a number of incredible uses.
One of the most important being that it can help companies that are developing protein-based drugs get to market where perhaps they couldn't because the proteins in the drug that they're developing are misfolded, and with pressure, we can fix that problem. As I mentioned earlier, what we're gonna spend our time on is our third technology platform. The total of these three, we have 30 issued patents, and we have seven of them in our new technology. Been working five years in developing Ultra Shear Technology. We just sent out a press release about a month ago talking about our first distributor and that we're gonna be working with this distributor on our first product. We sent out a press release yesterday saying that we're releasing the first product. The formulation is done. We're releasing the product.
We'll be shipping the product to our distributor in about 30-60 days. We're extremely excited that after five years and a lot of time, a lot of money, we are ready to commercialize what I think personally is the best technology I've ever been involved with. That's quite a statement 'cause I spent 50 years in the business and I've seen a lot of technologies, but I've rarely seen anything even that holds a candle to Ultra Shear. I'm gonna turn it over to Alex in just a minute, who's gonna go through Ultra Shear, what it is, and what it can be used for. Alex, next slide, please. This is my last slide.
Basically, we have 350 instruments all around the world for our pressure cycling. We also have six to eight customers for our BaroFold. You can see some of the logos of the groups that we work with. They're very well-known groups. We help them in all aspects of pharmaceutical development, biomarker discovery, quality control, quality assurance. These are the same groups, maybe a different group within that company, that are already interested in Ultra Shear Technology. We have about 225 customers, and you can see some of them on the screen now. Alex, all yours.
Hello. Thanks, Rick, for introduction and you know. Briefly, my background is in life sciences, analytical sample prep. I essentially dedicated my entire career in sort of interfacing physics and life sciences and biology. This is actually culminating now in this Ultra Shear Technology project that is quite exciting because it literally combines the hardcore physics and hardcore molecular science in this case. We dedicated the efforts of developing this technology primarily focusing on the processing of immiscible liquids. As we all know, emulsions are basically the way is the only reliable method to blend oil and water. We are surrounded by emulsions everywhere, from lotions to the food products to coatings in the industry and in the drug delivery methods.
They all share the same issues that usually hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials do not blend together well or do not remain stable. The emulsification is the way to make those immiscible liquids cooperate with each other and remain in the stable suspension, so colloidal suspensions. The conventional methods of preparing emulsions typically rely on the very physical fluid shear, and that could be achieved by mechanical shear, rotor-stator homogenizers, where the blades are spinning at high speed relative to one another. The ultrasound-based technologies that essentially use very intense sound waves to break molecules apart. High-pressure homogenizer is basically the method that comes closest to what we're trying to do at Pressure BioSciences. Unfortunately, all conventional methods have some limitations.
They've either low efficiency, poorly scalable or, you know, cost quite a bit of. In order to scale the process, some of the scalable techniques become very costly at production scale. For instance, the ultrasonic systems that are used to prepare the blends of oil and water rely on the standing sound waves, and as a result, there are low energy regions in the center across the product flow where the product doesn't experience the highest possible level of energy required to basically break the molecules apart.
Conventional homogenizers, the fluid shear stress drives size reduction, and this is illustrated here by the model where the high flow rate is directed through the flow restriction. Essentially, the width of that restriction or the gap size defines how efficient the process would be. The shear stress is a function of the product viscosity and the so-called shear rate. That is essentially a fraction of velocity over a gap size in this case. Conventional homogenizer using typically a fixed size orifice through which the whole product flow is directed. There are limitation of how small that orifice could be constructed physically. Also if it's too small, it's actually prone to clogging.
In our systems, we developed this interesting approach to fight the possibility of clogging and increase the potential amount of energy dissipation across this shear nozzle. We actually cover the flow rates in the current systems from less than 1 mL per minute to 8 L per minute, and a range of pressure levels from 10,000-60,000 PSI. As this equation suggests, the higher the pressure level, the higher velocity used in the process and the smaller the gap, the best efficiency could be obtained, in this case, at relatively low cost. Our solution to, you know, prevent clogging, actually, it was a little counterintuitive.
Instead of making the orifice smaller, we decided to plug it proactively ahead of time. Control the force at which that orifice gets plugged. Essentially now the gap becomes an annular opening between these two components of the valve. The maximum shear stress is experienced in that very, very small area. An entire product flow is directed through this gap such that none of the product material could escape treatment with this high energy dissipation, as you see from this graph. This work development have been funded in part by research grants from National Institutes of Health and United States Department of Agriculture. The latter was the grant with the grant project in collaboration with The Ohio State University. I'm gonna discuss in a moment.
There are a number of issued and pending patents that cover this level of innovation in Ultra Shear Technology. The collaboration with The Ohio State University recently resulted in the foundation, you know, of this consortium to advance commercialization of Ultra Shear technologies. It's basically we are the only industrial founding member of the consortium, but the goals of the consortium is to develop applications for food and beverage industry, and also attract the attention of the industry members to financially support and provide ideas for new research projects. All of the basically academic research around the Ultra Shear Technology. We plan to license the technology and help the industrial consortium members develop specific applications for their products.
The teams at PBI and Professor Balasubramaniam that runs the Ohio State group. Now the bottom photo is showing the demonstration laboratory at the Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, which is currently installed there, and this is the prominent piece of UST equipment that is now being shown to industrial consortium members. Now, this is the student video that was created by the Ohio State lab. Luckily it's subtitled since the sound will very unlikely be passed through Zoom connection. As I mentioned, the group at Ohio State is primarily focusing on developing dairy products and plant protein-based beverages that are becoming very popular now on the market.
The Ohio State demo lab is equipped with a variety of techniques, including non-thermal processing to inactivate spoilage organisms in food and beverages. Their research is also focusing on using the combination of high pressure and thermal effects and the high shear stress to improve the pasteurization of the food and basically to improve the bacterial inactivation process of creation of these new food products. A lot of attention this group pays on to the thermal properties of the product as it passes through the system. Aseptic collection of the product at the end is performed, as you can see in the current video.
Recently, the Ohio State team has published the first paper that resulted from this collaboration. Actually they were focusing on augmenting the dairy products with the plant-based protein material. In this case, the protein from pea preparation. In fact, the UST treatment had shown very interesting possibilities of changing not just the product texture, but also taste and stability over time. Because essentially UST treatment has resulted in blending of the casein protein and the plant-based protein that tend to separate in the conventional homogenizer treated material. There's an opportunity here not just to create a stable product, but also alter the taste, the texture and some additional product quality attributes that are still being investigated.
Going back to the emulsions, this is a good illustration that the UST process is highly tunable, and it allows us to sort of dial in desired droplet size and the clarity of the resulting emulsion. The nanoemulsions are now becoming highly popular in the nutraceutical field due to the fact that the size of the oil droplets in these emulsions actually translates directly to the product stability and the absorption and bioavailability of these bioactives that are containing in the nanoemulsions. Essentially, as the oil drop has become smaller, they begin to behave as individual molecules in two solutions. That basically is the basis for the stability of nanoemulsions.
As you can see, it also stops scattering light as the droplet sizes become smaller, the emulsion becomes translucent and then eventually transparent. Additional benefit of getting this small is the fact that the nanoemulsions could be sterilized by a filtration through the 0.2 micron filter, essentially giving us a potential of preparing injectable grade preps of the oil-based material and suspended in water. This process retains bacteria and most viruses 'cause if our oil droplets are below 100 nm, they certainly don't get retained on this filter material. Just to give you an example how those emulsions look, the conventional method of blending results in quick separation. As soon as the UST process is performed, they become uniform and transparent. These emulsions are stable.
We actually on some of these emulsions undergoing stability studies for over two years at this point. We're quite excited to see that they could be stored at room temperature you know in refrigeration conditions or even frozen. These conditions do not destroy the stable nanoemulsions. One of the good examples is the CBD nanoemulsion that we've been working in collaboration with some customers to develop. As you see here, this is one of the oldest samples in the stability study, 730 days, and basically retains the same uniformity and clarity. Note that both of these samples have been prepared at 40,000 PSI on high-pressure homogenizer platforms.
The one on the left, we're not gonna name the manufacturer, but that's one of those conventional high pressure homogenizers. The one on the right is our UST system. There's a fundamental difference. The laser pointer light traverses through the UST process nanoemulsion and gets completely scattered as it hits the larger size, 200 nanometer oil droplets that are appearing milky. Another added benefit there, obviously, these nanoemulsions are blended into water at any proportion without you know turning it cloudy. Another example is the krill oil. For instance, krill oil have been known to contain you know good fats, the omega-3 fatty acids and very rich in phospholipids that act as natural emulsifiers.
Essentially, this slide shows the UST processed krill oil containing astaxanthin, very powerful antioxidants that is responsible for the red color of salmon and the plankton in the ocean. It also essentially emulsifies itself because of the phospholipid content in krill oil. Without addition of any externally, you know, external emulsifiers, UST process can generate very stable emulsions at the relatively small size. If we add emulsifiers in the optimized amounts, the astaxanthin nanoemulsion could be created in down to about 40 nm droplet sizes, which is completely transparent, and yet retains its beautiful red color. Another example in nutraceutical space is the curcumin. Curcuminoids have been implicated in the anti-inflammatory activities, and they really help in arthritis and joint pain.
The problem with that, they're very, very poorly soluble, and essentially the administration of curcumin always require, oil-based formulations. The powdered material usually has to be emulsified in the gastrointestinal tract, and that process is not as efficient. Our UST nanoemulsion actually undergoes, in this example, up to seven freeze-thaw cycles, maintaining its droplet size. Another example is the applications in cosmetics, retinol and the other antioxidants contained in liquid could be nanoemulsified, and then that increases their permeability through skin. Again, up to 16 months stability have been studied to date with this specific prep. Another example is the pharmaceuticals and the drug delivery.
Most of the drugs currently used on the market are hydrophobic, which means that they either require chemical modifications to become water-soluble or administered with the like oil capsules. Nanoemulsions actually create additional opportunity to administer those drugs. In fact, this prednisone nanoemulsion model shows the transcutaneous absorption and the long stability of this drug could be improved if it's nanoemulsified. Another market is organic agriculture. In fact, it's a very big problem. The pesticides cannot be used in organic farming. Plants develop their own immune system, essentially. Essential oils in plants act as natural pesticides. Some of these essential oils have been well known to help to fight the pests in the field.
We actually send some of the samples of the neem oil nanoemulsions to our agricultural partners to evaluate their effect in the field. Just to summarize, UST has a very broad market potential. We at PBI are shifting our focus from the R&D scale to manufacturing scale, both on the equipment design and also giving customers early access to experience the power of UST in the development of manufacturing processes. We are actively seeking partnerships and collaborations, and we, you know, excited to announce that the UST commercialization is actually going to occur later this year. Rick, back to you. If you could wrap up the business goals that we have in this project.
Thanks, Alex. We are very excited because Ultra Shear Technology, which has seven issued patents, including a very strong patent on the what we call the nano-gap valve. It perhaps is the most important patent of the seven in our Ultra Shear because it's a. I guess it's pretty intuitive, but nobody came up with it before Dr. Lazarev and Dr. Ting on our team did. Because of that, we've already received patent issuances from China, from Japan, from Australia, from the U.S., and we're close in Europe, in different countries in Europe. It's so if somebody tries to do what we're doing, first of all, it's very tough to learn how to work in high pressure.
We all work under pressure, but working under high pressure, as Alex said, we're talking about pressures that routinely are at 40,000-45,000 PSI, which is almost three times the pressure at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana's Trench. We are working on systems that will go up to 60,000 PSI. We certainly have generated some data that indicates that the higher the pressure, the better the nanoemulsion. We're very excited about our ability. We've been working for over a dozen years in high pressure, so very excited that we've been able to do this. We are filing additional patents, as we go along, as we learn things, as we discover things.
I'd say this is a really good time to look at perhaps picking up a position if you're not an investor in Pressure Bio or perhaps adding to it. It's a great time because five years and many millions of dollars and a lot of sweat and a lot of pain has come to the point where we are now commercializing Ultra Shear Technology. We've announced it. We have at least one deal. Perhaps everyone has read that we are working on additional deals. We are saying that there will be additional deals to come to the table in the coming weeks, not months and years, but weeks.
The deal that we announced yesterday was a deal that the distributor, who is a seasoned distributor, thinks that he can do $3 million in a year of selling this aerosol CBD nanoemulsified CBD spray. It's an oral spray. He thinks he can do $3 million. He's gonna do a lot with the veterans. He's already talking to some nursing groups that represent about 10,000 nurses that really work a lot with the veterans in the U.S. The deal that we have with him is it's going out under his label. He's doing the final manufacturing. We're making the nanoemulsified material and getting it ready and then shipping it, and then they'll be doing the final filling, vialing, labeling, and selling.
Yet we're gonna get about a third, roughly 30% to a third, of the revenue that comes in, which would be $1 million. That is one example with one distributor on one product. There are multiple distributors that we're talking to, multiple products that we have. Alex already showed some in areas like astaxanthin and neem oil. Whether it's agriculture, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, which will take a long time, but we certainly have a play there down the road. The biggest play right now is probably in nutraceuticals, followed by ag and cosmetics because of the minimal regulations that we need to go through. We know what we're doing. We're very, very excited about what we're doing.
We've looked at what the competition is, and what we know is one of the pearls of marketing. You know, if you can solve a problem, you're probably gonna sell the product. There is a huge-
Let me ask you a question about that. First of all, I wanna offer a huge congratulations. I know this is a long time coming, and this is an amazing achievement. Kudos to you.
Thank you.
Absolutely congratulations to your team. Why does this distributor want to emulsify the CBD? Is it shelf life? Is it like higher CBD content? Is it efficacy? What's his thesis?
Yes, yes. The primary thing in my mind is the emulsification. There are some pretenders out there. There are probably some real guys out there that can emulsify. But can you emulsify and get to not emulsify, but nano-emulsify? Can you nano-emulsify, get down to under 100 nm size droplets of oil that contain the active ingredient, in this case, CBD? Can you do that in a system that can scale to anything that you need in manufacturing, whether you're the largest soda pop seller in the world, or you're the mom and pop soda pop seller down the street? Our system can do all.
We have bench tops, we have larger scales, and we can scale this to, we think, just to as big as your building is or as big as your room is. We built it to scale. It's also stability. It gives tremendous stability. As Alex said in the beginning, these small particles are by nature much more stable, and Alex showed a slide of 24 months of rock solid stability of CBD. We've never seen that from anybody, ever. We've searched the literature, we've searched customers, and we've never seen 24 months. That was, by the way, six months ago when we
Right.
when we did it. The nano-emulsification is the most important, but with it comes the ability to scale, with it comes an enhancement, usually in flavor and texture, if you're talking about a food item, and with it comes this amazing stability. Alex, you wanna add anything to that?
Yes, please. Let me jump in here. We just had a discussion with a potential customer on the subject and obviously there's multiple levels of advantages when the CBD is prepared this way or any other nutraceutical for that matter, which is soluble in oil is prepared this way. In fact, industry has many concerns about, you know, going into beverage packaging like aluminum cans, for instance, that are coated with plastic on the inside to insulate the product from a potentially corroding aluminum metal. That plastic surface has been known to absorb some of this oil based active ingredients.
It's interesting to note that once the product is optimally formulated and reaching those small droplet sizes, it does not bind to the hydrophobic polymer inside the can because industry had noted the loss of active in cans. Since you don't see it, if it sticks to the walls, you basically don't get enough of the active ingredient when you consume the product after it's stored for a while. If emulsion separates, that oil sticks to the wall and you would never know it's there. It could actually deplete up to 30% of the active ingredient from the beverage that you prepare.
It's, you know, the problem usually is harder to detect unless it goes through a stability study and real analytical process to determine how much active ingredient is still contained in the suspended state.
This contract, will you guys be responsible for 100% of the manufacturing?
No. No, we're not a manufacturer of the end product. Our job is to enable others to do their job, which is to sell a highly valuable final product that will, when you want to take it, you absorb what's in it, and that requires pretty much a nanoemulsion in most cases. What we are doing is we're emulsifying, nanoemulsifying the original material, starting with good quality CBD. Steve, it's a... I chuckle a little bit when I talk to some people, and they go, "Oh, well, we have an amazing strain of CBD. It's the best quality in the world." Guess what?
If it's in oil, which all CBD is, if it's in oil and it goes into the system and it's not nanoemulsified, you're lucky to get 10% of that really good CBD into your system. What you need to do is nanoemulsify that really good CBD. We're working with good sources of CBD. We're nanoemulsifying it. We're bringing it down to under 100 nm in every case for CBD, sometimes down to 40 or 50. Because of that, we're getting a very good bioavailability. We're doing a study right now. We started a study with extremely well-known scientists. We just started, so the data will be a little while.
Historically, we know there's a lot of literature out there that says a true nanoemulsion should give you tremendous bioavailability of the active ingredient that's in the oil.
You know, one of the things I know, which is a problem for CBD or cannabis in clinical trials, is the inconsistency of the product. I would imagine, and I'm guessing here, that your process could actually give them kind of a very accurate count so that they could have consistency in the product and then really put these, let's say, 200+ cannabinoids, through real clinical trials.
I'm gonna let Alex take it that, but I wanted to make sure that I was clear with your question. Your question is, are we doing all the manufacturing? We are doing the manufacturing, the nanoemulsion, taking the stock concentrated nanoemulsion and sending it to the bottler, vialer, labeler of the distributor. We'll do that in every case. We're not gonna make the final product. We're not gonna be a cannabis company. Our job is to get whether it's cannabis or or any other, you know, astaxanthin or retinol, doesn't matter. Our job is to get it into a very stable, concentrated nanoemulsion, then send it out in bulk and let them do their own vialing and labeling and selling. Okay. Now I wanted to make that clear.
I think Alex was gonna talk about what you just mentioned.
I just wanted to add one sentence to what you just said. You know, part of our process is the filter sterilization, as I tried to show on the slide. As a result, we actually give you a sterile nanoemulsion in the bulk container. If it's dispensed aseptically, that becomes sterile product at the end. We also have recently performed a study that to our surprise, this nanoemulsion actually withstands not just pasteurization, but retort process. 130 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, and the droplet size does not change. I was literally astonished. I expected it to separate, because basically what happens when you cook that chicken soup, you see the fat float to the surface.
Right.
that never happened with our nanoemulsion.
So-
It's essentially the recipe that we come up with is equally responsible for the stability as the physical process, but the droplet size is very critical for that. As you guessed, absolutely, I agree. The uniform suspension and the temporal stability of this prep would definitely enable clinical studies that haven't been conclusive to date.
Callie, I know there's a number of audience questions, so why don't you take those?
I will do that. Alex, I'm gonna ask you to just stop sharing your screen, and we will get into some of the audience questions.
Okay.
Again, I'm gonna kind of combine a few. What chemicals are required to emulsify? Does this work with protonated? Sorry, I'm not a scientist.
No, you do.
I'm just verbatim reading.
Actually, the protein work has been conducted recently at Ohio State, and one of the advantages that they found that it's not an emulsification process in their case in that last publication where they combined milk and the plant protein together. What happens that it basically makes a very stable suspension because the protein is partially denature and wrap around each other. If you don't go through the process, you get the green protein from pea sink to the bottom, and the milk protein, the white layer, float to the top. That's obviously unsightly, but it also creates the inhomogeneity and problems in the product development. It also improves the texture. It basically gelates to some extent the product. You can think about creams.
You can think about various other products that really not contain gels or, you know, xanthan gum and all this, those external thickeners that.
What Alex is saying is that, and what the paper said is that the Ultra Shear Technology process can help make the product creamier, thicker, more viscous. You don't have to add that in. I was talking to Dr. Bala , who is in charge there, and he was talking about having something that's low-fat ice cream that tastes like Häagen-Dazs or something like that, because the system makes it creamier, tastes creamier. It opens up the flavor molecules and it makes it more viscous. I think, Alex, if you could, one of the questions that Callie mentions, chemicals that are used, I think it's important to talk about, if you would.
Sure, absolutely. I was gonna come back to that. Absolutely correct that emulsion stability relies on the formulation, and so emulsifier is critical for that. Oil, no matter how small droplets will become, if it's just oil and water, it will eventually stick back together. You need the charged molecules around each droplet, so they repel from each other and not fuse together, right? That's how emulsions work. Now, we tested a variety of emulsifiers. Our trend and goal, as is the industry trend as well, is to stick with non-GMO, organic lecithins and other sort of natural, naturally derived emulsifiers. Those are phospholipids. Those are good for you anyway. As I mentioned, the krill oil contains enough phospholipids to actually act as a built-in emulsifier, so you don't need to add anything.
That's one of the examples, you know, probably one of the exceptions of the rule. If you take, let's say, olive oil and want to emulsify it, we will add lecithins to it. We work with several vendors of highly purified lecithins that, you know, we believe are very consistent, and we actually have seen that, experienced that throughout our R&D process. They provide us with the non-GMO organic certificates when we buy those reagents, so we can actually enable the whole branch of industry that guarantees that all these nanoemulsions contain no synthetic chemicals.
You said it at the end. The bottom line is that we pay more money than probably most do to get a non-GMO, natural, plant-derived materials that we use in our nanoemulsification. We're not using chemicals. We're not using anything that was genetically modified.
Thank you. PBIO can only claim concentration of active in the nanoemulsion concentrate, especially if further diluted with water in a final packaging. Is that correct?
Correct.
So-
we essentially focus now, and that's the lower hanging fruit for us. We're focusing on high value bioactives that have to be in, you know, basically, they're hydrophobic and they cannot be in the solution in water. those could be prepared as concentrate and then require very high dilution to like, sort of antioxidants, the vitamins, the bioactive ingredients. when we also working with other processing vendors to create higher concentration of those actives. Emulsification has to be done at certain concentration. If you recall those curves on the slides I showed, there's a plateau. At some point, the droplet size cannot be made smaller with a certain concentration of active and the amount of oil and water. apparently, they could be more concentrated afterwards by removing the water from.
How small, Alex, can you get? I mean, you know.
Yeah, we have seen 20 nm size, and essentially the 20 nm, to give you a good example, therapeutic antibodies are like 3, 4 nm in that range. We are approaching the size of large single molecules. Going smaller would be physically impossible in most cases because, you know, for instance, you have an oil droplet that contains diluted but dissolved active ingredients like CBD, for instance. Those are relatively large molecules. There are only so many molecules can fit into the spherical shape and still contain dissolved solid, right? This is where the plateauing of those curves.
If I can jump in, 'cause then we want to get to as many questions as possible. Smaller is not always better, Steve. Sometimes smaller is a lot more costly for very little bit of benefit. There's a diminishing returns at some point. What Alex said during his talk is that we've developed this system so we can almost know in advance, once we've worked with a molecule, how far we have to go to get it to the point where it is the most efficient. It may not be the smallest, but it's maybe it takes half as much money to get to a certain point, but it costs three times more to get it further, but you're not gaining much from it.
We can go down to 20, but sometimes 40, 60, 80 nm. Our goal is to keep it at 100 nm or less, in everything we worked with so far. So far, that's where we are.
Great. Thank you. Do you sell the equipment alone or does it require a license agreement?
We don't sell the equipment. We're not planning at this time to sell the equipment. I think anybody else in our shoes would probably make a similar decision. Remember, our first commercialization just occurred yesterday with the press release. We will be selling, or our partner will be selling the nanoemulsified CBD aerosol spray starting in, we think, August or September. We mentioned in the press three different profiles, three different runs, smaller, bigger, and then a very large run over the next six months. That's basically tolling. We're going to be tolling for people for the next six-12 months. We have a lot of individuals that are interested.
Number one, I think we can sign more, as I mentioned, we can sign more contracts pretty soon and have before the end of the year a multiple of people selling different products. Number two, right now it doesn't make sense for us to sell the equipment because we have a certain amount of equipment, and that equipment is gonna be used for tolling. When we get into next year, as this thing really starts to take off, we'll consider a lease and license model where we will lease the system for two, three, four years and charge some kind of a licensee that might be based upon the volume they're doing and everything. But that's definitely the next step after the tolling is a lease and license.
The actual selling, if somebody walked in and threw a pile of, you know, $100 bills on our table, we'd have to think about it. Right now, in all seriousness, we think that the lease and license is the next step after tolling.
Great.
Another reason to stage it out that way is that the equipment sales require large infrastructure for installation support on site and so forth. We're not there yet. We've done that with the lab equipment, the smaller scale instruments, and we basically overwhelmed our support team, so we'll have to double or triple that.
In essence, what Alex is saying, and he's a scientist, but he's hitting the nail on the head. I'm an ex-scientist. What Alex is saying is that it's time to start making money. It's time for us to start showing our shareholders that this company has spent a lot of money in the last five years developing this amazing technology. The best way to generate cash, the best way to generate revenue, and the best way to get to profitability by the end of next year is to toll, followed by a lease and license, not the model that includes a lot of overhead in terms of selling the equipment. That may come as we get bigger, but right now, the best way is the way we're doing, tolling followed by lease.
Thank you. At a recent small-cap conference, you mentioned partnership discussions with several large beverage CBD consumer product companies. Can you give us a general update on how those discussions are going? Very specifically, do you expect to close a deal with a beverage company this year that would bring in non-dilutive capital?
That would be a statement my lawyer does not want me to make. Our goal is to do just that. I can't sit here and say that, you know, we're close to doing it. We may be very close to doing it, but our goal is to do that. We have a consortium. We're the co-lead of a consortium. It's an academic industry consortium with Ohio State. Ohio State's just absolutely incredible food and agriculture college that they have at The Ohio State University, at The Ohio State University. We are working with them. We had news, Alex, yesterday, some very good news that we can't talk about, but good news yesterday.
Dr. Bala is on his way to Denmark, where he's gonna be talking about what they're doing in this high-pressure meeting in Europe with a few hundred absolute experts in high pressure. Our goal is to sign multiple deals. I don't wanna be able to count them on one hand. Realistically, I probably will have to count them on two hands, but more than one hand, before the end of this year, and that's gonna include at least one cosmetics company, at least one agriculture product, and at least one beverage company. At least those three, plus the one we announced, that's four right there, and we have a couple others that we're working on, you know, supplement companies that we're working on.
We think it's a success if we release the first product in early August on the market, and by the end of the year, we have six or more partners out there in multiple areas, not all in CBD and not all in a CBD aerosol spray.
Hey, Rick, let me ask you one question, which is, if there's a company out there and they wanna join the consortium, how do they go about doing it?
They should, they can email either Alex or me, and then we will pass that right on to Dr. Bala. Rather than going through all of that with Dr. Bala, send it to us, and we can explain what the consortium is, and then we'll send it to Dr. Bala. Again, we are 50/50 partners. They have already shown Ultra Shear Technology to over half a dozen companies. They have more lined up for July, and I can tell you, some of these are small, and some of these will blow your socks off. They're our partner. The mission of the consortium is to show the power of Ultra Shear Technology to the food and beverage industry. That is the purpose of the consortium, and they're our partner in that.
That's great.
That's great. Well, I think our time has come to a close. We appreciate everyone joining today. For any additional questions or if you want a direct connection to Rick and the team, everyone here has my email address. I'm happy to facilitate that. Rick, in turn, will have all of your information to exchange, you know, questions and answers and any upcoming press releases. I wanna thank everyone for coming, and I wanna turn it back over to you, Rick, for any final words to the audience.
Well, I'm glad the movie star showed up. Thank you, Steve, for moderating this.
I thought you were talking about me.
Alex, thank you for taking your time, 'cause I know he's got so much to do before this long weekend, but he took the time to put some slides together and help me out here, which is great. I just wanna thank everybody. I'm a little shocked because this is one of the few times in my life where we finished before the time that we were allotted. Let's I don't wanna blow that. I just wanna thank everybody for taking your time, and we're gonna let you go now. Everybody have a great Independence Day weekend. We're gonna be back to work next Tuesday because I tell you, we.
Right now, we hop out of bed in the morning and run to work 'cause it's very different than it's been for a number of years. We have something to prove. We're gonna prove it. We have the goods to prove it. Boy, it's gonna be a blast the second half of this year. Thank you.
Rick, I wanna offer you a huge congratulations. This is an incredible achievement, and I'm just so happy for you. Congrats.
Well, you guys are great too because you've been getting the word out through your systems, and we'll continue to get it out through your system. Thank you both.
Absolutely.
Thank your team.
Okay. Hey, have a great holiday.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
Take care.
Have a great day. Thank you.
Bye.