Extremely important and recognized and famous. It's getting lots of pickup and lots of awareness in the media among athletes, among celebrities, among biohackers, among physicians, among researchers. NAD is a coenzyme found in all living cells, plant and animal, and it is critical to all key metabolic processes, including mitochondrial function and cell repair. The absence of NAD leads to advanced aging. ChromaDex has a portfolio of molecules that are precursors to NAD, one of which is called nicotinamide riboside. Nicotinamide riboside is by far the best precursor on the market that is available. It is an extremely efficient and extremely safe way to elevate NAD. We have launched it in the marketplace as a dietary supplement called Tru Niagen. It's the most successful new dietary ingredient to have entered the dietary supplement space in the last 50 years.
It has more research behind it than any other new ingredient in the industry over the last 50 years. It works as a dietary supplement. The issue with ChromaDex, and I always say if we were to do a business school case study for the company ChromaDex, the case study would be how do you sell a dietary supplement that works like a drug. If you take Tru Niagen, nicotinamide riboside, it is not something you're just going to pee out. It's not sawdust. It has actual prophylactic and therapeutic value. It does something. So the business plan around ChromaDex is to be more than just a dietary supplement because we know the thing works. Let me put it to you this way.
If you knew that a molecule existed, an ingredient existed that elevated NAD very safely and very efficiently, and you knew that by elevating NAD, every cell in your body, but particularly the ones that are damaged, and indeed every organ in your body would heal better, would age better, you had that molecule, you had that ingredient that you knew was safe and improved the way the body aged. If you knew that that were true, how big a market do you think that is? How big a market do you think that is if you could take a pill that would improve the way your body aged? And what if you had the best scientists in the world proving that it could do that? These are our scientists. Two of them have Nobel Prizes.
One is the head of neurology at Harvard, one head of chemistry at Stanford, biochemistry at Cambridge, the world's leading authority on milk. Our ingredient is found in milk in trace amounts. The liquid of life is where nicotinamide riboside is found. One is a leading cancer researcher at Scripps to make sure that the thing is safe, which it is. These scientists, Dr. Brenner at the top is the actual inventor. He's the one who discovered that nicotinamide riboside elevates NAD when he was at Dartmouth. Now he's at City of Hope. These scientists and the excellent scientists that presently work at ChromaDex have been conducting research on this ingredient for the last 20 years.
You know, when you're a company that comes up with a new ingredient and you patent that ingredient like ChromaDex and you get a phone call from Harvard saying, you know, we understand you have this ingredient. Do you mind if we do a study at our expense to prove that it works for an indication that we think it might work? Arthritis, Alzheimer's. But we would like to do the study. We'll pay for it. We'll pay for it. And we'll share any intellectual property that comes out of it. You just need to supply the agreement, allow us to do that. That would be a good call, right? If you're an ingredient company, that would be a good call to get. And if you got five of those calls or ten of those calls, you got a blockbuster ingredient, new ingredient.
We've signed 275 of those agreements with the world's leading researchers where they pay for the research. We supply the ingredient. We share the intellectual property from by far the best research institutions in the world. NAD is a hot area. And we have the ingredient that best elevates NAD, and it does it safely, and it does it efficiently. And everybody who's sitting in this room right now should be taking Tru Niagen. And if you don't want to buy the ChromaDex stock, don't. Take the fucking ingredient. It works. We've managed to get this company to a place where it's cash flow positive. It's been cash flow positive for a couple of years now. We've been growing. We've been managing our costs. But even within that, we've been investing in R&D because we don't really see ourselves as a dietary supplement company.
We see ourselves as an NAD company because we think the market potential for NAD is very, very significant. So we've been planting the seeds and building the infrastructure that we can leverage this dietary supplement business into other businesses. And earlier this year, we launched the second vertical. I have this slide, this thing. So vertical number one for us is this dietary supplement, Tru Niagen. Vertical number two, we launched in August. So I asked you guys if you had heard of NAD. Only a couple of you really were familiar with NAD. But I can tell you that in the anti-aging biohacker, supreme athlete, model, actor community, what's been very popular over the last five years is this idea of getting NAD IV infusions. It's a very popular thing. It's a very hip thing. So here's the thing about NAD as a pure molecule.
The NAD molecule itself is a very large molecule, and it's a nucleotide, meaning there's a phosphate group on the perimeter of it. And for those two reasons, NAD itself, the pure molecule of NAD, does not easily get up into the cell. It is not taken up into the cell. It needs to break down into smaller molecules, one of which is ours, nicotinamide riboside. If I showed you the molecular structure of NAD and NR next to it, you'd see NR as a subset of NAD. Once it breaks down into NR, it then gets upregulated up into the cell, converts into NAD, and is an extremely efficient. So why am I telling you all this story?
The reason I'm telling you this is because these big name superstars, and it's big name superstars, it's people with 300 million followers on Instagram, get these NAD IV infusions, and they swear by it. The problem with an NAD infusion, because of what I just said about the molecule, is it takes three hours to ingest. And in all cases, they have these terrible side effects like stomach pains and headaches. But if you did Niagen IV, our ingredient, 15 minutes, no side effects, and many times higher NAD elevation than pure NAD, we've got a better hot product. So we wanted to make sure it was patented. We wanted to make sure it was FDA approved, and we wanted to make sure it was pharmaceutical grade. And we spent the last four years doing that, and we launched it in August. Now, on Thursday, we're doing our earnings.
I invite you guys to listen to Ozan's very first earnings call on Thursday to see how the launch went. We're not disclosing it in advance, but I'm sure this will be part of the conversation. We are very excited about this vertical. We're excited about it not only because we think it's a great business, but because all of these influencers, if you will, will be and are already switching over from NAD IV to Niagen IV. It will have a wonderful halo effect on the Tru Niagen business in general. So we see it not only as a vertical, as a business, but as a marketing initiative to Tru Niagen. But beyond that, when you have a molecule this good, it's crazy not to pursue pharmaceutical. Now, I know a lot of investors say, well, pharmaceutical, it's a risk, it's expensive.
But remember the thing I said, the 275 companies that come to us and pay for the studies? The Norwegian government has paid for a study on Parkinson's disease, an age-related disorder. Many of us know people who have suffered from Parkinson's disease. They are three and a half years into a four-year study of 400 participants. 200 get a placebo, 200 get Niagen, a gram a day for a year. That study will be done in May. That's a phase III clinical study completed in May on Parkinson's. And for what it's worth, we offered to do an extension to all participants that completed it, and 100% have continued on the extension study. We've already published two phase I, a phase I and a phase II, and it hit the endpoints and the secondary endpoints on both of those studies. You never know. It's a double-blinded placebo study.
We don't know the actual results, but we understand the mechanisms of action very well. And we know anecdotally what people who have neurological disorders say about Tru Niagen. There is a chance that we will get a good result within the next year on Parkinson's. Just imagine, if you will, that we were a standalone biotech company, not a dietary supplement, profitable dietary supplement company, just another biotech company who's losing $20 million a quarter, and all we're doing is pursuing Parkinson's. That's it. What would our market cap be? If we were just that, we're not just that. That's a little piece of the puzzle. And it's not just Parkinson's. There's another disease here called ataxia-telangiectasia. I do the best I can. It's a tough word. But this is an orphan disease of children that age rapidly. NAD and aging are very linked.
And these kids have undetectable levels of NAD, and they age so rapidly that they die often at age 20. We already have a phase II clinical study that showed the main endpoint is what they call failure to thrive. They showed a statistically significant improvement on the phase II. We're now applying for an IND to do our own orphan disease study on Ataxia for nicotinamide riboside for Niagen. I ask you, if we were a standalone company that had a published phase II clinical on an orphan disease like Ataxia, and there is one, there's a company called Larimar. It's studying Friedreich's Ataxia. It's a standalone public company. It loses $14 million a quarter. They're studying that orphan disease. They have a market cap of $500 million. That's all they do.
I'm just saying that our business plan is tethered to an ingredient, which we think is a very special and very unique ingredient. And our strategy is to pursue commercialization of that ingredient in numerous verticals. First, to verify that our intellectual property is solid. Second, to make sure that the science is first-rate, credible science from peer-reviewed published publications, high-impact factor studies, of which we now have 33 published clinical studies and another 40 or 50 ongoing. And third was to develop the expertise in each of these verticals. But all the while, we're a profitable company. We're flirting with $100 million in sales. We're not out there saying we only have two, three, four, five, six quarters left of money. We don't need money. We're not going to raise any more money. I'm just saying it ain't bad.
I think I covered most of this stuff about what we are. I just want to say one other thing. We have some beautiful partners. Our investors are excellent. The companies with whom we do business are excellent. The largest shareholder is Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong. Nestlé owns 5%. Mark Zuckerberg owns a small piece. Phillip Frost owns a piece. GIC, sovereign fund owns a piece. Those are our mainstay institutional investors. We do supply the ingredient to Nestlé and these other, so we actually supply to competitors in the dietary supplement space very selectively, and we have limited distribution in retail. Mostly, it's an Amazon and website company. That's where the bulk of our revenues are derived from. I talked to you about the injectable, what we had to do to get there. It's FDA approved. We did the study. We applied for the patent.
We also came out with a product that some people who take it say, "Well, what's my NAD level?" There's a kit that we can make available to you if you want to know what your NAD level is. Then take the pill for a few months and then test and show that it's working. NAD in general, as most of you guys know, if you don't know now, now you go home and you're going to see a lot of it. All of a sudden, you're going to see NAD. If you do a Google search on NAD, you'll see. It's available in lots of clinics near you. These are the advantages of the Niagen IV versus the NAD IV, which I just mentioned. I mentioned to you two therapeutic potential benefits, Parkinson's and Ataxia. There are numerous others. Okay. I think you got the idea.
This slide just simply says NR is what we're commercializing, but we have many other molecules. The pipeline for products is very long. We developed this pipeline in IV and in pharmaceutical. There's also a skin cream potential for the company. There's the dietary supplement. But there are also other molecules that we're working on and researching that may actually even be better than NR or perhaps a different pathway or other qualities that we could sell them both. But these are all patented ingredients at ChromaDex as well. These are the four guys mostly running it. We've just recently added a CMO, Michiko Kelly. Her picture's not up there quite yet. She said she doesn't have one. Okay. It'll be up there next week. In terms of our financials, again, we have our earnings call on Thursday. We invite you to listen in.
The press release will go out Thursday. You'll see the latest quarter. But by and large, we've been cash flow positive for the last couple of years. We ended last quarter with about $28 million in cash. There's no debt. Sales last year, I think, was about $83 million. We had forecast about a 15% growth year over year, and that's just on the one vitamin. That's basically the company. You see how we break it down? The e-commerce business is the bulk of our business. Watsons is a retail chain in Hong Kong. They buy it from us wholesale. It does extremely well in that region. We'd like to sell it throughout that region, but we need to get regulatory approvals in some of those countries: Taiwan, China, Japan, but in Hong Kong, it's extremely popular.
If you know anybody in Hong Kong, a good thing for you to do due diligence-wise and ask them, "Have you heard of Tru Niagen?" By the way, another thing to do due diligence, if you're interested, is go on Amazon and read the ratings and reviews. There are about 14,000, 15,000 of them, and we don't have any impact on them. They're completely independent. It'll give you an idea of what people are saying who take Tru Niagen. We were losing money. Now we're not. And that's it. That's all I got. Any questions? Yes, sir.
What happens if the pharmaceutical trial is successful? What is the relationship to the rights that you have with that?
So we have a very deep patent portfolio here. But the phase III study that's done was not done under a commercial IND, and it's being done in the EU.
So the likely scenario is the next step would be to apply to the EMA for either provisional drug approval or actual outright drug approval if the study is successful. The strategy in the U.S., though, would be to wait with the FDA. And because we control the ingredient with patents, we feel protected there. We think people who have Parkinson's that read about a study like this, that also hear there's a safe dietary supplement out there for $100 or $200 a month that works, we think it could have a dramatic impact on our sales of our supplement. There are 10 million people in the world that have Parkinson's disease.
If the study is successful and it's written about in a great journal and is picked up by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Parkinson's Foundation, we think a good percentage of the Parkinson's community, let's say 5%, will search out that dietary supplement and purchase it. And if it is 5%, that's 500,000 people. And if we charge $200 a month for the pharmaceutical-grade version of it, that's $100 million a month. If we can get to that place, we probably won't apply for FDA approval. That's plenty of revenue. That's a big company. That would be good enough to supply that. But what I'd like to see is if we can get drug approval in the EU. So that would be the strategy that we will approach.
It could change depending on the results of the trial and the response we get from the E.U. But I believe that the FDA will require us to do many more studies before we get drug approval. Incidentally, if that happens and we choose to pursue it, we will spin that off. We won't raise money at the ChromaDex level, and we won't affect the ChromaDex P&L with that investment. That would be a spin-off with a separate investor group.
The IND, let's just say I'm an individual and I want to use it. How would I go as an individual to get that IND? And then also, is it going to be sold in Europe or other countries too?
We're getting a lot of phone calls in the E.U., particularly the U.K. We're also getting them in Asia and quite a few of late in Canada.
It's very popular here and growing in those territories. We have a website called NiagenPlus.com. And on that website, we try to maintain a list of clinics in the country that are supplying it. So I think that list is fairly current. If you live in L.A., you can find it now unless they've sold out of it at Restore Clinic, Next Health Clinic, and Drip Hydration Clinic. Those three I know are carrying it in the L.A. area. New York as well. There's a place called Clean Market in Hudson Yards, which is, I mean, these are all within the last few weeks have begun carrying it as well.
And how much does it cost to get it individually?
That's up to the clinic, but it's not cheap. It's $500-$700 per session. Okay. Oh, yeah.
I saw this presentation here in the room seven years ago.
And why isn't everyone anyway?
Well, it's $100 million in sales, and seven years ago it was $2 million in sales. So it's gone somewhere.
This is seven years ago.
Okay. But $2 million to $100 million ain't terrible. It's not as good as it could have been, perhaps, but. Well, a lot of people would like to see it do. It's such a good ingredient. You'd like to see it do hundreds of millions of dollars because the potential is there. But this is where we're at. If that's nowhere, I like the way you think. Anybody else? Yeah.
I don't know that it's relevant with NMN and David Sinclair's work at Harvard, but when you compare or contrast the two and the IP moat that they're working on to restrict NMN, is there a comparable?
Absolutely. That's a major issue with us.
NMN is another molecule that competes with our molecule. You see that we have patents on NMN as well, but we don't have all the patents on NMN. David Sinclair has promoted NMN very aggressively, and he's promoted the NAD story very aggressively, and NMN became very popular. My guess is that NMN was doing about $1 billion in retail two years ago. The FDA, unfortunately for them, has banned it. It was banned for a number of reasons, the main one being that they didn't follow proper protocols in getting the approval to sell NMN. The other is because of the way it's made, it's not safe. It has the presence of endotoxins. The sales of NMN have plummeted because not only the FDA, but also the China FDA have also banned sales of NMN. Now, I know David Sinclair quite well.
He believes that we are not competitors. He thinks that we have a common goal of advancing the message of NAD. We think the fact that NMN has built up the market yet is not legal is actually a good thing for us. And for what it's worth, NR is about 40% more efficient and safer than NMN. But the reason why NMN became so big as opposed to NR is because it's not controlled or patented. You literally had 500 companies selling it. That's really why. It just became this publicly available ingredient that you could buy from 20 different places in China. Whereas with us, we have patents and we're controlling it and it's measured. That's the reason. Even at its peak, there was never an NMN company nearly as big as us, but collectively, NMN was much bigger than us. But.
Sorry, I forgot to run out of time. So any other questions besides sort of the next presentation? So thank you so much.
Thank you.