Hello, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's virtual non deal roadshow. My name is Noella Alexander Young, virtual event moderator here at Renmark Presenting today is Ted Carcas, Chairman and CEO. The presentation will last approximately twenty five minutes and will be followed by a q and a session, for which you can participate using the chat box in the top right hand corner of your screen. With that being said, I will now hand over over to Ted.
Greetings all. Thank you, Noella, and thank you all for joining today. We originally scheduled, this presentation, I don't know, maybe a month ago when I was going to talk a little bit about the proxy and the upcoming vote. My attorney told me not to. Suffice it to say, the items in the proxy are going to set us up beautifully to build a world class crypto treasury strategy.
I'd like to discuss that at the end. It said at the beginning, especially for those of you that are new to the call. I want to do an overall on the company. And then at the end, I'll talk about the potential crypto treasury strategy and how that fits in with our company as it's set up today. So I think it's more important first to go over the basics of our company before we get into new potential strategies and initiatives.
And with that, I'm going to assume you've all read the forward looking statement and that you know what is meant by it. Basically, everything I'm going to say today, I speak from the heart. Everything I say today is accurate as of today. Does not mean that things don't change in the future. There's no guarantee that we will update you in the future if things change.
With that, I'm going to assume that you've all read it. By the way, this presentation is available on our website. First of all, the slide presentation is available now on our website. The video presentation that we're doing right now will be available on the website as well in approximately one to two days. With that, quick overview of the business verticals of our company.
So first of all, I put at the top Crown Medical Collections $50,000,000 initiative. I have to put that first. Even though it's not a, quote, business, so to speak, it's obviously an incredibly important feature of our company given the silly stock price. And I'm sure I'm not supposed to say silly stock price, but it is. The market value of our entire company right now is under $15,000,000.
I am confident we are gonna collect a significant portion of this $50,000,000, if not all of it. If you talk to Crown Medical, they'll tell you they think there's a chance we're going to collect more than $50,000,000. So just the cash that we anticipate collecting over the next, you know, two to nine to twelve months could be multiples of the entire market cap of our company. Therein lies a significant opportunity in and of itself. And just by way of background, for those of the you that are new, we got into COVID testing.
I did this actually with my son, Jason Jason Carcas. He handled the business development. We generated a $100,000,000 a year of revenue. What what's important about me telling you this, by the way, also, is the fact we were not the first in in COVID testing. In fact, we got into it because we met with a company that had a lab that was one of the first labs in the country validated for saliva testing for COVID.
I thought, wow. What a great business. I wanna invest in this business. We had turned around and sold the coldies, cold remedy brand a few years earlier. We're sitting on cash.
We're looking for new opportunities. So we're investing in this company. That company ended up going bankrupt. We ended up we decided to do it ourselves. Never obviously knew anything about COVID.
Never been in the lab business before, and yet we entered the business maybe six, nine months after everybody else, and we killed it. We ended up outperforming 95% of the labs in the country. The reason I highlight that is because I believe we're going to do exactly the same thing with our crypto treasury strategy. I will say that to the end. My point is you don't have to be the first in to be successful.
In fact, sometimes you're better off not being the first in because you can learn from everybody else's mistakes and do it the right way. And I promise you, if we do this, we're going to do it the right way. I'm very excited about it. But having said that, so we did all of this COVID testing, and then we knew that COVID wasn't going to last forever, and we went into a new line of business, Nebula Genomics. We ended up spending an enormous amount of money building out a lab for Nebula with the same approach we had done with COVID testing.
If you our idea was if you build it, they will come. With COVID testing, we built that enormous lab, ended up being hugely successful. Best decision we ever made. We took the same approach with with Nebula Genomics, building out the lab, but the problem is we were funding it initially with debt and with leased equipment and so forth because we were doing testing that we were supposed to get reimbursed. The government had guaranteed reimbursement over COVID testing.
And then all of sudden, the government ran out of money for reimbursement, and all of sudden, we got cut off of capital. And, again, this isn't capital where I hoped additional capital would come in the future. 95 percent of biotech companies fail because they have a block of money they burn through and assume that more is coming in. I never did that. However, unfortunately, we ended up in the same situation.
We actually did the COVID testing, didn't get reimbursed for a portion of it. In total, we didn't get reimbursed for a little over $150,000,000 worth of testing. And the reason it says 50,000,000, initiative is because Crown Medical, they it's has a couple of dozen attorneys working completely on contingency. We're not paying them a penny. We would not have all of these attorneys working for us if they did not believe that we were going to collect a significant amount of money.
And so the bottom line is we are now going after this $153,000,000. Crown's perspective is that we're gonna have to provide discounts. We're hair cutting to be conservative in terms of how much we're actually going after that we're convinced we're absolutely going to collect. And then when we negotiate with the insurance companies who also owes money, we're going to give them a discount to settle rather than go through lengthy litigation. We believe most, if not all, are going to settle before litigation.
Litigation is going to be very embarrassing for these insurance companies. And so when you haircut what we think the discount will be to the insurance companies, and then we have to pay the contingency fees to the attorneys, what's going to be left, they're approximating, will be $50,000,000 and could be more. We have a general counsel, fractional general counsel that works very closely with us. I don't want to embarrass her or highlight her. I'm sure she's listening to the call, but she is fantastic.
She is hands on on the Crown Medical initiative, and we are moving this forward now at a really nice pace, and I'm really looking forward to next steps. I should also mention regarding this that we are working on a potential securitization of this receivable. What what does that mean? It means there's there are companies out there that fund litigation. If they think there's going to be a positive outcome to litigation, they will give you equity, cash, not debt, not anything you have to pay back.
They'll give it to you at a discount, and then they earn that discount when they when they collect the money when the receivables comes in. I feel really good about this initiative that we're working on with our general counsel to actually get a funding upfront, which could be a large amount of money, certainly relative to the entire market cap of our company. I don't wanna say how much. It's not a guarantee, but it's possible in the short term, we will receive a significant block of equity capital, not dilutive. And that will also show our shareholders in the market that this collections initiative is real, and it will show how silly our stock prices and our market cap is at present.
Having said that, I know as CEO, I'm not supposed to talk about stock price. I am confident our market cap is going to be a lot larger, higher, greater than it is now in the future. And I know that there's a whole new group of shareholders who have been purchasing stock while it's it's been down here, you know, whether 30¢ or 50¢ or or whatever. I look forward to making all of you a lot of money in the future. And I am still the largest shareholder in the company, and I still believe wholeheartedly in what we're doing.
There's a tremendous amount of value in the company, and Crown Medical is just one of those initiatives. We then also want to get into this. These are the other subsidiaries of the company. I'm going to talk a lot about our b smart esophageal cancer test and DNA completed nebula genomics, less about our pro phase supplements. I want our company to be streamlined.
I wanna focus on a couple of main businesses and also focus on potentially crypto treasury strategy. We want to be less diversified, more concentrated, more focused, and kill it in the business verticals that we develop. So having said that, I've been advised not to talk about this slide anymore. I have a history of performing on behalf of our shareholders. It goes back listen.
I I've I've been an entrepreneur for forty years. I made a lot of money for a lot of people over those forty years, over the period of time that I've been the CEO of of Prophase Labs. When I took over control of the company, it was virtually bankrupt. The stock trading at 65¢ when I turned around the Kaldi's brand and sold it for $50,000,000. Got into COVID testing, stock price exploded.
And understand our stock price went up, you know, from a dollar and a half, $2, all the way to 60. We ended up raising 37 and a half million dollars at $12.50 a share. We had an ATM at the time. We had to authorize shares. We didn't go dumping stock at 65¢ and 85¢.
We raised capital opportunistically. That's the idea. I'm gonna talk about it later with the crypto treasury strategy. Our goal with our proxy is to increase our authorized to a billion shares, not to dump a billion shares on the market today. That's ridiculous.
Given that I'm telling you how much underlying value I think is in the company, that would be silly to do as a largest shareholder. That's not the goal. That's not the game plan. The game plan is to use that billion shares of authorized shares to attract large players to say, hey. This could be a very large deal, not in a not another small crypto treasury reverse merger deal.
And, again, I'll I'll get into that later. But my point in pointing at the slide, yes, the last nine months have been a disaster for the stock price. For those of you that are new to the company or for those of you that have capital, I I think it's an enormous opportunity. Similar to when I turned around the company in in 2012 and the stock price was 65¢. I believe I'm going to turn around the company now where given where the stock price is and where it could be in the future.
I think we're going to build dramatic value in the company over the next year and two years, even over the next six months. And I'm going to do it just like I did it back in 2012 and when we got into COVID, you know, back five years ago. And so with that, let me move on. Just just a couple of quick highlights. I do want to point out, we sold the formalized manufacturing facility in January.
We shut down the genomics lab laboratory in February. We fired enormous amount of people in March and April. We canceled an enormous amount of IT overhead in March, April, May. And so as we move forward into the latter parts of this year, particularly as we get into fourth quarter, we we also had an enormous amount of very, very high interest rate MCA debt. I had no choice.
You know, when you have a low priced stock and nobody wants to give you capital, even though we had all this underlying value, I had no choice at the time. It was it was it's really unfortunate. It would've been nice if some of our long term shareholders had been more supportive. But I ended up having the the company had to suffer by taking on high interest rate debt. It was one of the largest expenses of the company was this high interest rate debt.
We now have gotten rid of that, fortunately. We do have one convertible preferred outstanding, but that convertible and I'll talk a little bit more about this later. Number one, it's currently carrying a 10% interest rate. Number two, it's not convertible for several months. And number three, we have the right to prepay this loan at any time without penalty.
And unlike a lot of other shells and penny stocks, they'll have multiple preferreds to control the company and destroy the stock price destroy the company, make it impossible for shareholders to ever make money. We have nothing like that. I have forty years in this business. My background's on Wall Street. I didn't do anything stupid like that.
And whatever mistakes I made, I'm now cleaning up the company. I'm now fixing it. We're now moving forward. And so we have one convertible preferred out. I feel good about the people I'm working with that have the convertible preferred.
And if anything doesn't feel right, I'll I'll just buy it out in its entirety so that they can't convert a single share. So I'm not worried about that. Also also as it pertains to our crypto treasury strategy, any big players that want to do a deal with us are going to want to know that there isn't some kind of an ugly debt deal, and I've already been discussing this. Nobody has an issue with the one convertible preferred that we have outstanding. And relative to the size of the types of deals we're working at, it's it's not a lot of money anyway.
Okay. Crown Medical, I already talked about it a little bit. We're getting into the individual slides on the individual subsidiaries. I'm not going to talk more about Crown Medical, but if I haven't completely covered and you have questions, please I love doing the q and a with Noella, which will start in about fifteen minutes. So submit submit your questions.
I'm happy to answer all questions. Prophase Biopharma. Let's talk about our esophageal cancer test. So besides the fact that we have this Crown Medical initiative where we may collect 50,000,000 look. I don't know.
I can't guarantee we're gonna collect $50,000,000. There's no way to tell right now. But I can tell you based on the numbers, it's it's as good an estimate as any other estimate I could give to you as to how much money we think we're going to actually collect. I'd be happy to collect a lot less given the market cap of the company. We collected $30,000,000.
It's more than double the entire market cap of the company just in cash. Alright? And the fact of the matter is I think there's a good probability. It's not a guarantee, but probability it's gonna be a lot more than $30,000,000. Alright.
Our esophageal cancer test. This is absolutely huge. I'm really excited about it. The clinical study results have been fantastic, so much so that there's a major journal getting ready. I don't I don't know if I'm supposed to say this yet because it hasn't been published yet.
I believe that we have a major journal that's very interested in publishing our clinical study. That's a critically important next step because that's what brings in the key opinion leaders, and then you point to that when you then go to the physicians to say order our test. And it starts off small. It can start off like a grassroots type of a campaign. Our goal would be to work with we're already contacting groups or networks of hospitals and medical physicians who would order our test.
And then what happens is they start to order it, you start applying to insurance companies to get reimbursed, and it can develop like a hockey stick. Very similar to what we did with COVID. Same thing. We started off small. Word spread that we had this great lab that could do the testing.
We developed relationships, and it took off. Same same thing is likely to happen with our B. S. Partisophageal cancer test. The bottom line, like to just look at the numbers a little bit and just understand, esophageal cancer is one of the deadliest cancers.
It comes from that acid in your stomach that your esophagus, the lower part of your esophagus connected to your stomach. When that acid is churning, your stomach starts to eat away at the bottom of the esophagus, developing precancerous cells. That's a condition known as Barrett's esophagus. The reason why Barrett's Esophagus is so important, one in fifty to one in one hundred people with Barrett's Esophagus will develop esophageal cancer. And the reason why that's so concerning is because roughly eighty percent of people that develop esophageal cancer will die of it.
So anybody with that bad acid in their stomach, they go and they get an endoscopy. It's where they stick a tube down your throat and they collect tissue specimens from your esophagus. A pathologist will then study those seven, eight, nine tissue specimens under a microscope and give you a diagnosis. The problem is it's the human eye looking through a microscope. It's an inexact science.
The proof that it's an inexact science is in the fact that eighty percent of people diagnosed will die of this terrible cancer. And the reason they die is they're diagnosed too late, and they're it's not exact the diagnosis is not exact. We have a test that will make that diagnosis significantly more accurate. So and one of the most important features of a new test coming on the market is the convenience. There's nothing more convenient than this test because there's nothing additional the patient has to do.
We're this is for patients that are already getting the endoscopy. The physician already has the seven or nine specimens. You only have to send one to our lab or whatever lab we work with to analyze that specimen and give you a more accurate diagnosis. It is a no brainer. We think that this is going to be a monster test and the market the target market is in the many billions of dollars.
So just people getting endoscopies related to GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease, which is the precursor to esophageal cancer, that's roughly seven million endoscopies per year. If we get reimbursed $1,000 $2,000 per test, that's a $7 to $14,000,000,000 market. And I'm being told it's possible that the reimbursement rate is going to be closer the high end. But regardless, the 7 to $14,000,000,000 market, we think there's virtually no competition for a test. There are blood tests out there and other tests that are you get prior to getting the endoscopy.
Those are not competition. If you test positive on a blood test, the next step is to go get an endoscopy. So it's not competition. It's actually complementary. If these blood tests and other tests that are precursors to endoscopies, if they grow if the market for them grows and they do more business, more people are going to be getting endoscopies, which is will actually be good for our business.
A blood test will never replace an endoscopy. Alright? GIs are married to their endoscopies. They're a huge believer in them. They're not all of a sudden gonna switch off for blood tests.
And you can think about it like with COVID when you would get the antigen test, and if you tested positive on that quick rapid test, the next step was to then get the PCR test that went to the lab. Well, this is the same thing. If you test positive on any type of a test for esophageal cancer, any type of test prior to getting the endoscopy, the next step is going to be getting an endoscopy. That's where we come in. We also have IP.
We just got the final patents on the IP for the eight key proteins that virtually always express themselves when you're developing esophageal cancer. Those patents are huge. They're global. They're huge. They're undeniable, and it's going to make this a a hugely valuable test, and I'm really excited to get going.
The next step is the journal, so so watch out for when we get published. Alright. I don't need to go into all this stuff, but I actually already did that compared to the liquid biopsies. I will move on from there. This is just showing the eight markers, the eight proteins.
You can look at the slide presentation for yourselves. Suffice it to say we have some great IP and we have a phenomenal test. And you can also look a little bit more at the timeline and so forth. Alright. DNA complete Nebula Genomics founded by George Church, world renowned in the field of genomics over the last twenty years.
We purchased the company. It was it was this company was created by George Church and two of his disciples who and when we acquired the company, the disciples ended up coming to work for us. This business has been developed over the last eight years. The mistake we made was building out a lab without the money. We thought we had the money from the COVID testing.
I've already gone through that. And so we ended up with a huge amount of overhead. We've now cut out all that overhead, cleaned out the company. Jason Clark has took over. The interesting thing is he did the same thing as he did with the COVID testing.
I had hired a senior guy with thirty years of experience in the lab business. Jason ended up replacing him. Our business took off when we replaced him. Well, same thing. Jason took over here, cleaned up the business.
It's now maybe for the first time in its history, a breakeven to profitable business. Wow. I I I wish I had gotten Jason involved and we've done this a long time ago. In any event, it's now a breakeven to profitable business. We now have changed our subscription.
It used to be you could buy a three year and lifetime subscription. Now you can only buy a one year, and then you have to renew. What's interesting is the response rate and the pricing is virtually identical. We were giving something away that we didn't have to. So that was changed, and what we're finding now is people are renewing at a high percentage rate.
The people that are renewing, that's basically free money to the company. It costs very, very little on our end. It's a little IT for us to provide the services for those that renew the subscription. And and for those that don't know much about the business and, yes, we have an initiative, by the way, with ThinkEquity to potentially sell it, which I can get into. Maybe I'll get into that in the q and a.
But just very, very quickly, we have a world class genomics business whereby you do ancestry tests if you wanna learn about your ancestry. You only have to study 1%, less than 1% of your DNA to learn about your ancestry. It'll link you up to people around the world than in the past. If you wanna learn about your health, it only makes sense. You wanna study your whole DNA.
Think of your DNA as a strand. Ancestry tests study this amount of it. Whole genome sequencing studies the whole genome or the whole DNA. That's what you want if you want in-depth information about your health. This is your genetic makeup, diseases that you could be predisposed to, etcetera.
Everybody is interested in this type of information. We have a world class reporting system for providing an enormous amount of health related reports related to your DNA. It's that simple. It's low priced. We have now partnered with a fantastic lab or two that are now very efficient, and so it's all systems go with our business going forward.
And then the gaining issue is now that we've cleaned up the business, as dollars come into our company from our Crown Medical and some other initiatives that I'm going to be talking about, do we build this business or do we sell it? We could sell it right now for one price, or we could build it for a year and sell for maybe three or five five times as much. And so these are variables I have to contend with. With Colby's brand, when I actually sold it, I actually had an opportunity to sell it two years earlier for $21,000,000. I turned it down.
It would have been a lot of money to the company at that time. Two year less than two years later, I sold it for $50,000,000. Now it would not have been a mistake to sell it for 21,000,000. I would have been high fiving people. They would have been, you know, patting me on my back.
Great job. I sold it for 50,000,000 less than two years later. It was much smarter to do that. It's the same thing with our DNA complete Nebula Genomics business. So this is something this you have to look in the bigger scheme of things with our overall company, the cash flows, the capital, the capital that's required, etcetera, in in making these decisions, what to keep, what to sell, how to move forward.
These are things I'm thinking about every day. I'm making high level decisions, not alone in a group with our bankers, with our management, and these are decisions being made in terms of what's best for the shareholders. I care about I'm the largest shareholder in the company. I care about the shares in the company first and the ultimate price and value of those shares. Okay.
I'm not gonna go more into DNA complete. Obviously, George Church is still backing us. I wanna we're about to run out of time. You know, management, you know, investment highlights. You can all go through the slide presentation yourself.
The bottom line, as I mentioned, just some things to be aware of. And this as I said, we sold the Farmilaz manufacturing facility. Really cleaned up our balance sheet. By the way, Farmilaz was losing last year. It lost cup more than a couple million dollars.
Really, really frustrating. We sold it. It cleaned out enormous amount of debt in the company, cleaned out enormous amount of overhead in the company. We shut down our Nebula Genomics Laboratory, which had even more overhead associated with it. We dramatically reduced head counts, significantly reduced IT.
All of this happened in the first half of the year. So going into the second half of the year, if we collect any money from our Crown Medical collections, directly from the insurance companies and settlements and or from this initiative. It's sometimes referred to as a dip a financing, a debtor in possession financing, or we're going about another way and what's called securitizing this 50,000,000 of debt, and we could get a large block of money. And once we do, that would be game changing for everything else we're doing in the company and would be could potentially be significantly more in dwarf whatever debt and negative cash flow issues, you know, we've had in in recent months. Again, our b smart esophageal cancer test, I already reviewed that, DNA complete and so forth.
Equivir, honestly, I've been disappointed because we did this major clinical study. The preclinical results were fantastic. And in fact, even the clinical study, the early results were fantastic. The final results, we had a consultant who's working with a company in India to finalize results. I have not felt as good about the final results.
And, again, the bottom line is what should our company focus on? Right now, we have limited resources. So so Equivir is sort of up in the air at the moment. I know many of you were excited about it, but given, you know, we have a $14,000,000 market cap and we potentially have other assets worth a $100,000,000 or more, you know, we just have to decide where to focus our limited resources and other opportunities that we have. I that's the end of the slide presentation.
And before we get into the q and a, I haven't talked about the crypto treasury strategy at all. I know a lot of you are interested, and it's obviously top of mind in the marketplace and so forth. I just wanna leave you with a couple of very high level bullet points about that. First of all, the vast majority of the companies doing these crypto treasuries strategies are worthless companies doing reverse mergers. The problem with the reverse mergers is they value your company at virtually nothing.
The money that comes in takes over virtually the entire company. It sounds exciting, but it doesn't necessarily bode so well for the shareholders if you don't do the right strategy and the right deal. We are not even looking at reverse mergers right now. We're working with world class investment bankers. When I say world class world class in the sense that they're world class in their experience with crypto treasury strategies, and we're working with some very significant companies that they have introduced us to.
And I'm very excited about the potential for crypto treasury strategy. The first step was we have to get our authorized shares up. Because if you can't raise capital, and the goal is to raise capital, the stock price is going up, now the stock price is going down. And, again, I just spent thirty minutes going through all the underlying value on our company. So I'm not about to kill shareholders and, you know, sell a billion shares of 10¢ a share.
That that would be insane. I have no interest in any kind of strategy like that. And there's no reason to because I would rather not do a crypto treasury strategy. I'm confident that we're going to have liquidity events from our crowd medical. We could potentially sell Nebula and have a liquidity event there.
And so why would I just give away the company to crypto treasury strategy? So to the contrary, what I'm actually doing is we're working on a strategy where we would build from within, but we would be bringing in experts crypto treasury managers and bankers that have an enormous amount of experience and others, and it's no different than we've gotten into the COVID testing, quite frankly. I didn't know anything about COVID testing. I'm not a lab expert, but it didn't mean that I couldn't oversee the strategy and bring in the experts. And that's what we did, and now we're going to do the exact same thing potentially with a crypto treasury strategy.
So I can talk more about it in the q and a. I am looking forward to updating you in the near future. But understand, anything that we do in in that regard, my goal would be that it would be significantly accretive to our company in terms of the underlying value of the company and in terms of the potential and the opportunity. And just to be clear, for those of you that are so I don't understand crypto, and I don't understand the coins went up, they're gonna go down. Bitcoin, the dollar has devalued.
Go back a hundred years. The dollar devalues every year. It's the worst investment in the world because of inflation and because our government is always printing more money. That's how they fund the government. You know, that's how they fund the government and the economy.
To some extent, they're always printing more money. Alright? Bitcoin is just the opposite. And what's different about Bitcoin than every other crypto? There's a limited supply of of Bitcoin.
It's almost all been mined. There's very little Bitcoin left to be mined. It's ultimately capped at at 21,000,000 coins. We're not far from there now. And it's considered like liquid gold.
Alright? It's considered like gold but has no weight. You don't have to ship it. You don't have to store it. You can transfer it instantaneously.
It's basically, in some respects, it's replacing gold. Not to mention the fact you can always discover more gold. You can't discover more Bitcoin. Once the supply is out the supply is out. So, you know, once the supply once, you know, the the the supply is done and and growing, it's over forever.
And so you have a limited supply, and you have more and more governments around the world adopting Bitcoin. So we're just getting started here. I'm looking at the next one, two, three, five, ten years. I don't know that Bitcoin is gonna go up or down 10%. I couldn't care in the least.
But if we have a strategy where we have the best crypto managers in the world managing it, they're also then generating a yield. So we take a block of money. We could also potentially take a block of money from Crown Medical. No dilution at all. No issuance of any shares at all.
Suppose $50,000,000 come in, we buy $40,000,000 of Bitcoin that this is just hypothetical. We don't have to issue any shares at all. And then let's say they generate a yield on it. What's nice about Bitcoin is you can generate a yield on it. Could be six to 10%.
We generate an 8% yield on on $40,000,000, over $3,000,000 a year of earnings to our company. So I think about things like that. And then I also think about, yes, we got we're I believe we're going to get the authorized for a billion shares. And then the idea is if and when as our stock price is going up to raise capital, put that into Bitcoin. That's our general strategy.
I don't wanna go more into it. I'm kinda jumping around. I don't know how much I should say now. It's premature. But I can tell you the same way we got into COVID testing and blew that up big.
I believe we can do the same thing and not with a reverse merger that wipes out the value of our company. I just spent thirty minutes explaining to everybody why they're and how there's so much underlying value in our company. I'm not going to wipe that away. There are also creative ways with our investment bankers that we can set aside some of the underlying value of our company separate from the crypto treasury strategy. I don't wanna get into that today, but, again, I'm the largest shareholder in the company.
I'm going to protect our shareholders. And whatever we do, I think it's going to be an enormous opportunity for us. And what's interesting about our company versus most, if not all, of these other crypto reverse mergers, in those in in in those companies, most of them had no value in the company. They were desperate. That's why we had to they had to do that.
We're not desperate. We have enormous underlying value. And, you know, all the crypto traders and all the crypto analysts, they all talk about net asset value and where you trade relative to net asset value. Well, I think over the next year, we might have a $100,000,000 in net asset value or more, and we have a $14,000,000 mark cap. Alright?
Which means we're trading at 86% discount to what I believe our net asset value could be twelve months out. Okay? So let's start with that when you start thinking about net asset value versus all these other shells out there where no matter how much money you put in, that's less than the value of the company because something is left for the shareholders. So you're starting with just the opposite. You're starting at a at a premium to net asset value before you buy your first dollar of Bitcoin.
We we we, you know, based on the potential future, could be traded at 80% discount before we buy any. So there is a gap there that I think will be filled over time as some of the liquidity events and underlying value of our company get realized. I just said a mouthful. I hope it's not too much, but I know a lot of you have a lot of questions, and I wanted to give you some perspective on that. And with that, why don't we I ran a little over. Noelle, why don't we turn it over to questions?
Thank you very much, Chad, for the presentation. As you said, we'll now take some questions. Your first question is what are the next milestones for BSmart?
Next milestones? Fantastic clinical study, fantastic results, big step forward a couple of weeks ago when we got our final patents in. And now the next step is get that publication. If we get a major journal to publish our clinical study, that sets us up towards commercialization. That gives you the credibility you need because in that publication, there are key opinion leaders in the industry that also analyze your study and report on and give their opinions on the public that publication.
So that's next. I anticipate that coming in the short term. I look forward to reporting to the shareholders with a press release and an update when that happens. That will be a that will be a big next deal. We can then kick off actual commercialization.
So we're already planning for this. We're already reaching out to networks of physicians to get ready for the next steps after publication. Thank you for that.
Thank you, Ted. The next question is, what are the sales projections for BSmart for its first year post commercialization?
That's that's an excellent question. I really don't wanna talk about numbers in that much detail before we even commercialize, but what I can tell you is with a test like this, it's like any other test, it's gonna ramp like a hockey stick. So it starts off slow and builds slowly, and then it gains momentum. As it gains momentum, it becomes more widespread. And then before you know it, every g every GI in the country should be ordering our test.
This is a no brainer in my opinion. There shouldn't be a single endoscopy on the planet that shouldn't include this test if the purpose of the endoscopy is to check for esophageal cancer. It it would be foolish. Honestly, it it would be and it's just a matter of getting it started and ramping it up. The the enormity of this is scary.
And, look, I have a history of executing. I believe we're going to execute on this. And the only thing that would stop me and our company from executing on this personally is when we start to gain a little momentum, some multibillion dollar diagnostic company comes along and says, hey. We really want this, and they throw us a big block of money, and they say that they're gonna give us a royalty. And if they already have the distribution around the country and around the world, it might be a no brainer.
We might make so much money in that royalty that it may not may not make sense for us to go alone. But I want to do the first steps going it alone because the opportunity is just too large, and I don't I don't wanna sell cheap. Especially if we get in money from Crown Medical and there's no pressure on us from a capital perspective, we'd be crazy not to develop it by ourselves for six months or nine months or twelve months, you know, or twelve months, whether it's six months or twelve months. I think the value of our esophageal cancer could be many, many, many multiples of the entire market cap of our company. And so I want to see that through at least part of the way.
Thank you for that response. The next question is, treading into cryptocurrency requires expertise in the field. What background or understanding does management have to be able to go into this venture?
So well, I have several different ways I can answer the question. First of all, starting forty years ago, I was a trader on the floor of the New York Futures Exchange. I went to Columbia Business School, graduated top of my class from MBA with an MBA. My strength was math and numbers, and I was a trader myself. I also managed money.
I was I was also on the banking side. Coincidentally, I even took a seminar at Columbia on Bitcoin and cryptos seven, eight years ago and just brushing off my old notes. I am no expert on crypto. I am never going to be an expert on crypto. I also didn't know what a CLIA lab was when we got into COVID test.
That's not what you want from your CEO. You don't want your CEO to be an expert in crypto. You want your CEO to be able to recognize an opportunity and attract and bring in the right people, the right bankers, the right crypto managers, etcetera. We're working with the right people right now. I've already accomplished what I want to accomplish in crypto in terms of finding the right people to work with and the right companies to work with.
I I can give you examples of other companies where they did a deal and then all of sudden they brought in somebody that was a big name and the stock price went up 10 times. It wasn't because of the CEO. It's because of the people he attracted and he brought in. I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Potentially, not a guarantee.
This is what we're working on. But if we get into this crypto treasury strategy and there's a good probability that we're going to, we're going to attract some big players in the industry to work with us and develop the strategy with us. But at the end of the day, to be honest with you, it's really simple. Raise capital at higher and higher prices, invest in Bitcoin. We potentially will do other cryptos, but initially, I really like the idea of Bitcoin because I want to actually do something conservative.
It sounds like crypto is not conservative, but Bitcoin is actually conservative and that it's the ultimate store value. It's going to go up over time. If if you don't think it's going up over time, then you don't understand Bitcoin. It's going to go up five or 10 times over the next five or ten years. And so if we own Bitcoin and we're on earning a yield on Bitcoin and the earning the yield on that Bitcoin can be used as earnings for the company.
And meantime, you have equity funds in the many trillions and trillions of dollars. I, you know, I I could look up the numbers for you. But if you look at the entire even at today's price for Bitcoin, a $110,000 or whatever, it's a fraction. It's, like, five or 6% of the value of the equity funds in the world. Most equity funds cannot buy crypto directly.
So what do they do? They have to buy stocks, common stocks. So what are they doing? They're buying common stocks of the companies that are focused on Bitcoin. And in some case, Ethereum, these are complementary coins.
I'll get into that another time. I don't need to do that today. They're complementary. They're not competing. They have different uses.
But the point is there are equity funds. Most equity funds are going to want exposure to crypto. The best way to get exposure to crypto is to buy a company who's primarily focused on owning Bitcoin or some of the other coins. So what happens over time, these equity funds and the many, many trillions of dollars, you know, we're we're talking about approximately 20 times the size of the entire value of Bitcoin. They want to have exposure, they're going to do it by buying these companies and then just owning those stocks for the long run.
And as long as the company is managed conservatively with expert crypto managers that are well known and give a level of comfort to the institutional investors, they will invest. When I got into COVID testing, our stock price went up. We raised capital at higher and higher stock prices. The goal is to do exactly the same thing. I've already accomplished this.
I've already done it before. I'm going to do the exact same thing that I did before. That's the goal. Not a guarantee, but that's the goal. I believe we're going to be successful.
And, I'm not looking to dilute shareholders and and do anything silly. We have too much underlying value in the company. I hope that gives you an answer for now. I'm looking forward to really discussing this more in the future. But my expertise is exactly what it needs to be, and that is having the right relationships with the right bankers, the bankers who have done very successful crypto deals in the past and with crypto managers, very successful large crypto managers and others.
And these are the type of people that I'm working with right now to develop the strategy. I'm excited for the future. And, you know, for those of you that want to wait and see how it all plays out, you know, you can wait. That that's up to you. But I'm looking to execute, and I just see this as a big opportunity.
Same way as what happened with COVID. COVID, our stock price went up six times while we were working and developing our COVID strategy and building out a lab. We were barely doing any business when our stock price went up six times, and I raised actually, it's 37 and a half plus another about 5 and a half. It was about it was roughly $43,000,000 I raised over a couple of weeks. And that was just for a lab doing COVID testing.
Imagine what I could do with crypto given the size of the market and given this isn't a fad and given that we're looking to do this conservatively over the long term. I'm I'm really excited about this, to be honest with you. Noelle, what's the next question, please?
Thank you, Ted. The next question is, the BSmart esophageal cancer test has been submitted for peer review and may be commercialized as an LDT, benefiting from a favorable regulatory environment after the 04/01/2025 court ruling. What is the expected commercialization timeline, and how will commercialization be funded and scaled?
That's an excellent question. Summarized a lot of it. Really good question. I think I already answered this, and I and I don't wanna run out of time on questions. So and because I already answered it, I don't wanna spend a lot more time answering it again.
The next step is getting that publication which gives us the key opinion leaders and it it it gives us sort of that stamp of approval so that when we go to the physicians, we go to the gastroenterologist to say, hey. You should be ordering our test. They listen to us. And the way to do that is get into a network. Once you get into a network, you know, a large hospital group and so forth by the way, we have a director who's an integral part of one of the largest, you know, hospital medical physician networks in the entire country.
So there's a possibility that we we can do this on a very large scale relatively quickly. But, you have to walk before you run grassroots campaign. You start with a network of hospitals and doctors. And once you start doing business with them and you see the success of the test that also, by the way, the real world, real time results of when we're testing people, that then continues to build on our clinical study and gives us more and more results and makes our our test even more valid and even stronger. So it's going to ramp like a hockey stick.
And I think I pretty much answered that question, but it was an excellent question. Thank you.
Thank you for that response on the last 10. The next question is, how will digital assets be integrated and governed?
Sure. So, again, I some of these questions were probably asked at the beginning of the presentation. I I think I literally covered that five minutes ago. We're gonna have world class managers. It's not me.
I'm not the one that's going to generate a yield. I also didn't when the COVID samples when people got tested for COVID and the sample came in into our lab, I didn't handle the the sample. I didn't test it on our equipment. I had nothing to do with that. I oversaw the experts doing this.
Well, it's the same thing. We're gonna have experts doing it. I'm not going to be doing it. I happen to have a trading background. I happen to understand crypto enough to know that this is a phenomenal opportunity, and this isn't you know?
And I don't care if Bitcoin goes up or down 10%. It doesn't matter. It's already it's had a little bit of a pullback. It doesn't matter. Over the next ten years, I think Bitcoin's literally going to be a million dollars or more.
It's it's almost it's inevitable. Just based on supply and demand, it almost has to go there. So if over ten years, it's gonna go up about 10 times, we're going to amass Bitcoin. It's gonna go up over time. Our stock price is gonna go up over time, and we're gonna make money.
And we're gonna be generating the yield every step of the way. So the idea is to bring in the experts that can generate that yield relatively riskless. Of course, there's risk in anything, but you can generate a better yield in Bitcoin than than you can, you know, in the debt markets when you consider the risk. Of course, I take out MCA debt because these people the interest rates they charge are ridiculous. Even if they default, they still make a fortune on everybody else.
But, really, that's a little bit of a joke, but I just lived through this. But, realistically, Bitcoin will have will have experts managing it. Myself, our bankers, in combination. If the bankers are raising us a lot of money, they're going to want to see that it gets managed properly too, and and this will be a collaborative effort. We'll probably have an investment committee that will be made up of experts that will be making these decisions.
Thank you, Ted, for that response. Next, the question is, has Crown Medical been able to recover any money for you yet? Have they given you an update as to any progress?
Sure. So where we are right now, the complicated part in talking about this is because this is litigation and potentially bankruptcy litigation, I'm constantly advised not to talk about it. And so it it puts me in an uncomfortable position in these presentations. But what I can I can tell you is in the relatively short term, there's a good possibility, probability that we're going to get a significant block of money in that would not be coming into us if if this wasn't actually working its way all the way through where the money is actually going to be collected from the insurance companies? As I said, there are experts who finance litigation receivables, and they do that as equity, not debt.
So we don't with there's no liability to us. We just get that money, and we just get it at a discount. So somebody gives us $5,000,000, they take the first you know, I'm making up a number 6 or or So they give us $10,000,000, and they take in the first, you know, 11 or 12 or $13,000,000 of receivables. But once that kind of money comes into our company, that'll be game changing for us.
Cleans out our debt, gives us working capital, commercialize our esophageal cancer test, grow our nebula genomics business, you know, all all these really good things. So I'm looking forward to, in the not too distant future, having several updates on several of these liquidity events and initiatives.
Thank you, Ted. Next, Adi was asking, should we be worried about a reverse split to maintain Nasdaq compliance?
So that's a a good question. I've addressed it in the past. I don't think people really understand reverse stock splits because most of the time, the reverse stock splits are in companies that are relatively worthless. And so the reverse stock, you know, you they do the reverse stock split. The stock go, you know I don't know.
They do a one for five, one for 10 reverse stock split. They do a one for 10 on a 50¢ stock. It goes to $5 and then it goes back down to a dollar. It does that because there's no underlying value in the company. Here, have significant underlying value of the company.
So whether or not we do a reverse stock split, first of all, I haven't put in for a reverse stock split. I think there's a good probability the stock could go above a dollar without having to do a reverse stock split. But then there's also a separate strategy whereby if we do a crypto treasury strategy, we're raising billions of dollars at, you know, higher and higher stock prices. Our starting point, we might want it to be higher. And one way of doing that is to do a reverse stock split, but it'll be a reverse stock split with the goal of the stock price going higher after the reverse, not lower.
We're already at a we're only we're at, like, a 13 or $14,000,000 markup. And just to explain reverse stock splits to people, If you do let's say, even if you do a one for 10 reverse stock split. So you go you have a 100,000 shares of stock. You go from a 100,000 shares of stock to 10,000 shares of stock. But the number of shares outstanding is 10% of what it was, and the underlying value of the company is exactly the same.
So, again, the way I look at it, we have a $14,000,000 market cap and we potentially have a $100,000,000 of underlying value. Well, if we do a reverse stocks with one for two or one for 10 or one for a 100, we'll still have potentially a $100,000,000 of underlying value in the company and a $14,000,000 markup. So it doesn't matter when you divide just the number of shares you're dividing by. If you do one for 10, you're dividing by one tenth the number of shares. So on a per share basis, it works out the same.
So a reverse stock split isn't necessarily a terrible thing. It's only a terrible thing in companies that are worthless. We don't have a worthless company. And I'm not suggesting we're going to do a reverse stock split, but there's a possibility we would consider it in conjunction with our crypto treasury strategy. If it's not in conjunction with the crypto treasury strategy, then my goal and objective would be to see if based on execution of liquidity events and other things where the stock price would go significantly over a dollar without it.
I'm trying to be as open and honest and tell you everything I know as of today. As of right now, I am not planning on a reverse stock split. Doesn't mean that that can't change in the future, particularly as it pertains to if I work out a big deal that would be hugely accretive to the company and be hugely positive with some major crypto treasury players, but they say, hey, Ted, we don't wanna you know, your stock price is 35¢ or even if it's 50¢. We wanna start off with the stock that's at $3.50 or $5. Alright?
And then have the stock go up, you know, two or three or four times from there. Do I care? I just want the stock I just want the value of the company, the market value of the company to go up on a per share basis. That's what's important. That's what we as shareholders should all be focused on.
I hope that answers the question. You shouldn't be scared of a stock split, but as of right now, you know, we have a proxy out there. We didn't even put a a reverse stock split in there. So it's something that's always on people's minds, and people always say don't do a reverse stock split. The truth of the matter is I probably should have done a reverse stock split six months ago.
Then And people wouldn't be worried about it. We'd have the same market cap. Everything would be exactly the same, and nobody would be worried about it. That's in hindsight, that's probably what I should have done. But having said that, I I it is not currently planned for, but that could change based on working on our crypto treasury strategy.
Of course, I don't wanna be delisted from Nasdaq, and there's no reason to. We we qualify, by the way, for every requirement of Nasdaq other than stock price. Our shareholders' equity is significantly above what it needs to be, and all the other measures, we pass on every measure. So it's just a matter of stock price. And and so I gave a long answer to this question because I don't want anybody to be confused.
I don't want anybody to be worried. Again, I'm the largest shareholder. If we do reverse stock split, it's because after the reverse stock split, want the stock price to go up on a first you know, on a value per share base, not down. And then and it if it did go down, if anybody sold the stock after the reverse stock, let just use round numbers. So let's suppose our stock was 35¢ right now.
We did a one for 10, just to use easy round numbers. Our stock price theoretically would open at $3.40. If our stock price goes down and we have cash, I'll buy back every share in the marketplace if people wanna sell if they're selling just because of the quote reverse stock, it would be the best buy of all time for the company. It would dramatically increase the underlying value on a per share base of the company. That's what everybody should be focused on.
Not just the word reverse stocks, but it's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's a very bullish thing. If we do it, I promise you, think it will be a very bullish thing. Alright. With that, I spent a lot of time on that only because the subject comes up all the time.
And I'm always saying no, no, no, but I wanna give the full context. Noel, that was actually an excellent question. I'm glad I answered it. Noel, what's the next question, please?
Thank you so much, Ted. I think we have time for one more question here. So the question is, is Stuart Collins head still with the company and has he and has he accomplished any material activities?
Sure. So Stu started off as a consultant. For a short period of time, he became COO. Given the different directions in our company and the various strategies in our company, combined with the fact he's also the CEO of another company, it didn't make sense for him to continue as COO. So he went back to being a consultant.
But to yes. He's, you know, he's a phenomenal executive, phenomenal marketing expert. And to the extent that we are developing EquiVeer and other consumer products, he absolutely will still be working very closely with us. And he also set up some of the key marketing initiatives related to DNA complete and Nebula Genomics. And the funny thing is right now DNA complete, Nebula Genomics, with very little marketing dollars at all, are generating very nice revenues.
So now, of of course, part of that comes from being in the business for eight years, but our SEO, search engine optimization, is is tremendous, one of the best in the industry. It shows how valuable the underlying value of that business is. So I think that answers the Stu question. It also answers the Nebula question. We have strong SEO.
We'll use Stu when we need him on a on a consulting basis, and it's a a much better fit where we're at and where he's at now. We we might have time yet. If you have one more you really wanna squeeze in or we can be done.
Sure. I have one more question for you here that we can squeeze in.
Go for it.
The question is, what were the main operational changes that allowed an improvement in gross margins in q two?
Yes. Good good question. So we've dramatically dramatically cleaned up the company. This is exactly what I did when I first took over and turned around the company. I had to clean up, cut overhead left and right.
I had to get back to basics earlier this year and do the same thing. I was forced to, and it's unfortunate. If we had even a fraction of the $150,000,000 that was supposed to come into our company, our stock price would be, you know, $57 right now. Because I never would have taken on all the debt. I never would have had to issue shares.
There would never been any dilution. There would never been an ELAC. By the way, we canceled the ELAC. Oh my god. Thank you, Ted, for canceling the ELOC.
I mean, that destroyed our stock price. I'm really disappointed in how that played out. I don't wanna talk more about it. Bad advice, bad decision. But the bottom line is we've moved on from all of that now.
Alright? All those things were just diluting our shareholders, all things struggling, losing money. So we we cleaned up. As I said, we sold the manufacturing facility and it was reported as 23. A part of that was CapEx that we're going to have to spend, debt that was outstanding, losing money.
So that was a big cleanup. And then as I also said, a big one was shutting down our genomics laboratory. Jason found and developed relationships with a couple of really good labs. There were some growing pains, by the way, in switching from our lab to new labs, but we've now gone through those growing pains. We have some great labs.
I won't mention them by name. And we cut out an enormous amount of overhead and IT and all the things that the shareholders would want me to do, I've done. And so we're a different company now. We're an incredibly lean company, tremendous underlying assets and value and significant potential ahead.
Well, you very much, for your responses. Excellent question. Thank you very much, Ted, for all your responses, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions. If you did not get a chance to submit your question or your question wasn't addressed, you can reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Remark. That concludes our presentation for today.
But before we go, I will turn back the floor to Ted for final remarks.
Sure. So first of all, welcome and greetings Chicago. This is a virtual presentation. But in the old days, Redmark used to actually do them in person, and I would have had to have flown to Chicago to meet with all of you. Thank you to the other shareholders who are loyal, that have stuck with the company.
As you can tell, there are a lot of positive opportunities within our company. We're we're in a really good place right now where I think we're at a key point in time where we struggled for the last nine months, and we're very close, very close to coming out of those struggles and being a different company. I'm very much looking forward to coming out of the struggles that we've been in the last nine months. It has not been fun. I wish I had never gone through it.
I'm sure a lot of our long term shareholders wish we had never gone through this, but it happened. I suffered more than anybody as as being such a large shareholder. But such is life. I learned that a lot. I didn't know I had so many lessons still be to be learned, but I did.
And I'm really looking forward to the future. I am motivated. I am high energy. I am now walking 16 to thousand 17,000 steps every day. It keeps me young, vibrant, and I'm looking forward to killing it.
And to be honest with you, I think that the opportunities that lie ahead over the next three to twelve months are greater than anything I've ever worked on in my entire life. And so it's funny, and I'm saying this in advance, and I don't wanna jinx it. We're not there yet. But I think that the opportunities lie ahead are absolutely enormous. And I hope that I get there, and when I do, I I can't wait to write my book.
The art of the extreme comeback. I don't know what the name of the book will be. I I just made that up. I'm kidding. But I am looking forward to the future of our company.
I'm looking forward to the future of my career with the company. And I I appreciate all of you listening to me talk for the last hour. If you're an investor, I I think at least some of what I provided is good insight for you. And have a great day. Noel, as always, you're awesome.
I love doing these calls with you. Thank you, Renmark, for setting that up. And I'm looking forward to updating our shareholders with press releases and maybe another VNDR in the not too distant future on several of the topics that we talked about today. This is all very, very timely initiatives that we were talking about today. Noella, have a great day. Everyone else, really appreciate your time.
Thank you so much, Ted. Once again, this was Prophase Labs trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PRPH. Thank you to everyone in Chicago and surrounding areas for joining us today. The playback for this virtual non deal roadshow will be available on our website twenty four to forty eight hours after this presentation under the VNGR Library tab. Please stay tuned for other presentations in your area and see you next time.