Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for attending. This is our Oppenheimer 25th Annual Consumer Growth and E-commerce Conference, so we are very happy to have everyone in attendance, and we thank you. I am pleased to have with me our next presenting company this afternoon, Niagen Bioscience, and two of the company's senior executives, CEO and Founder Rob Fried, and CFO Ozan Pamir. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us.
Nice to be here.
We're going to structure this as an informal fireside chat with me asking questions, and the management team will answer those questions. To the extent there are questions from the audience, send them through the chat. I'll be happy to work them into the conversation. Rob, I thought, just for the sake of investors out there that may be less familiar with your company, I thought we could start with just a kind of an overview and some of the transformation that's happened. As you know, I've been around the company for a while. I'm a very big fan of the product as well for personal use. Just talk about maybe kind of how the company's evolved, the brand's evolved, the name change, and kind of where we're heading from here.
There's a coenzyme that's found in all living cells called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, NAD+. NAD+ is a coenzyme that works with other enzymes for virtually every metabolic process that exists within the cell, most notably energy metabolism, enabling mitochondria to create energy and repair of damage to the cell. It works with various other enzymes to repair gene damage, to eliminate oxidative stress, to repair physical damage. All the metabolic processes that exist within the cell itself require NAD+. One might look at it like gasoline inside of a cell's engine. The only difference is, in a car, when you have a small amount of gasoline, the car will still perform. In a cell, the amount of NAD+
saturation level impacts the performance level of that cell for all those metabolic functions.
When the cell is under distress, the NAD+ levels are very, very low, mostly because it's being utilized to repair the damage or create the energy, whatever it is it's doing. Aging is really just the accumulation of damage at the cellular and molecular level. Aged cells tend to have very low NAD+ levels. What we have shown after now 25 years of really extensive research is that the molecule that we control, we call it Niagen, also known as nicotinamide riboside, not only very, very safely and efficiently elevates NAD+ levels, but it does so in particular in the most damaged cells.
At this point, we have, I think, 40 peer-reviewed, published clinical studies, high-impact factor journals, the best journals from some of the most respected researchers in the world and the best research institutions, showing not only that it's safe and that it effectively elevates NAD+ levels, not just in the blood, but in tissue as well. Also, the studies that have been coming out now are on specific indications, mostly age-related indications, where showing a very significant therapeutic benefit for a whole host of conditions and even diseases for Niagen. We've built the company around not only that molecule, but other molecules that also elevate NAD+. We've set up the company to commercialize that not only in the area of dietary supplements, but in other commercial verticals as well. We have over 90 patents protecting the core molecule and all the other molecules.
We have the greatest level of scientific expertise and understanding in the world of NAD+ in general. We have been building up this foundation and this infrastructure for many years. Recently, as NAD+ has started to hit the mainstream, the zeitgeist of something you can do to improve the way your body heals or ages, the way it improves the way it ages, we are very nicely positioned to take advantage of that awareness in the coming years.
Rob, talk about, and I know you and I have talked a lot over the years about just all the clinical work that you have done. It really makes, and we can talk about competition in a moment, but I think what makes your company unique within this NAD+ space is all the clinical work that you have done. Maybe talk about some of that and kind of where we are going from here.
You know, the dietary supplement industry in general has not the best reputation. I would say that it's a very, that that reputation is fairly well earned. The reason for that is, in 1994, a law was passed known as the DSHEA law, which clearly separates dietary supplements from drugs and makes it quite clear what a dietary supplement company can claim. It says that a dietary supplement company cannot imply a benefit to any disease or near disease state. Because of that, dietary supplement companies generally don't do any research towards anything that might approximate a disease. Indeed, the growth of the dietary supplement industry has not come from innovation, new ingredients, new molecules, if you will, or new research. It's just been repackaging of old ingredients that have been around for decades. Dietary supplement companies, by and large, are just marketing companies.
That's all they are. They don't do research. They don't have intellectual property. They don't do much. This company, Niagen Bioscience, started as a testing service and evolved into an ingredient R&D lab. So the fundamental core of this company is in scientific research. When we joined the company eight years ago, the idea was to pivot from a research lab and a testing lab to a company devoted to NAD+ itself, to that specific coenzyme. So the foundation of the business, and indeed the way we operate, is very much different than all other dietary supplement companies in that it's rooted in actual scientific research and intellectual property. That puts us at a disadvantage to companies who don't invest the money in R&D or intellectual property or research in general, companies that just make false claims and sell a product on Amazon.
We believed then, and we still believe, and I believe it's coming to fruition, that by focusing on the research and focusing on the quality and focusing on the efficacy of the thing we sell, we are different than other dietary supplement companies. With time, we'll create the brand that is truly a trusted brand because the product we sell actually has a therapeutic and prophylactic benefit. I mentioned to you that to date, we've published, I believe, 40 peer-reviewed clinical studies and well over 100 preclinical, meaning non-human, animal, and dish studies. These are not just clinical studies. These are biotech-level clinical studies that are actually peer-reviewed and published and show statistically significant benefits. This is very rare. If you turn on television, a news channel, and somebody says, "A clinical study was done on my hair." It's not a peer-reviewed study.
It doesn't even tell you the results of that study. It's not published. It's not published in a journal. It's just marketing bullshit. There's no bullshit here. It's actual high-grade level research. The Scientific Advisory Board at this company has two Nobel Prize winners, also has the Head of Neurology at Harvard, has the inventor of nicotinamide riboside, now at City of Hope. He was at Dartmouth at the time, one of the leading cancer researchers at Scripps Research Institute, the former leading researcher at the National Institutes of Health as part of the National Institute of Aging. We recently added the dean of the School of Gerontology from USC. All of these people are working specifically on our molecules and on the research we're doing. It's a very, very high level of science, which is unique for a dietary supplement company.
It's frustrating, or has been frustrating for many of our investors in the past, who say, "Why don't you just hire Tom Brady and do a TV ad?" Because we're mostly not focusing on that. We're mostly focusing on a foundation of truth and a foundation of reality because we understand that NAD+ has a genuine impact on your health, particularly as you age, and that we believe that the day would come when people would get hip to that idea. When they did, and you waded through all of the marketing nonsense, one company would appear as being genuine and real and science-based. That's us. In those 40 clinical studies that have been published, some of them are very dramatic and significant. This month, June this year, we will complete a four-and-a-half-year phase three clinical study on Parkinson's disease.
That's 400 participants, 200 receive a placebo, and 200 receive a gram of Niagen a day for a year. That's very expensive and very extensive. It is being conducted by one of the most respected Parkinson's researchers in the world. You do not see that from dietary supplement companies. You see that from real hardcore pharma companies and biotech companies. We will complete that study this month. You are going to say, "Well, what are the results?" We do not know. It is a double-blinded, controlled study. We will not know the results for months. It will get submitted to some excellent journal and will be peer-reviewed and probably will not get published for a year. The public will not know the results of that study for a year. That is a significant study. Also, recently, we completed a study with Harvard, a small study.
It was only, I think, 58 participants on long COVID, which is a very important condition that many people have who have had COVID. They recovered from COVID technically, but they still have the fatigue or they still have the cognition issues or the depression associated with it. They have been able to find a resolution. That study was done with Harvard and was completed recently. The results of that have not also been made public. These are just two recent examples of actual studies on important conditions and indications included in those 40.
Rob, how do you, to your, I want to talk about how you basically connect with consumers. What you were describing there is how much better, how much stronger your research has been in this category. How do you articulate that to your core consumers? Because when you look at exactly to your point, if I go on a platform such as Amazon, there are all kinds of NAD+ type products out there. Yours is clearly the best. How are you communicating that to that core consumer?
It's a great question. If I were to teach a business school class or do a business school case study on Niagen Bioscience, the question would be, how does one sell a dietary supplement that works like a drug? You cannot imply a claim that would otherwise be reserved for a drug. What if you have a supplement that works like a drug? What if you have a cure for cancer? You couldn't imply that? That seems like a major restriction. What we have concluded, we believe we have a dietary supplement that is that great. What we have concluded is the answer to that is to not say it, not imply it at all, but let others do it for you. The marketing strategy is pretty much a word-of-mouth strategy where we communicate with people that you can show test study results.
We do the studies, we take the results, and we communicate them to doctors, physicians, healthcare practitioners, researchers, podcasters, journalists, investors, but not to consumers directly because you can't. The regulations are pretty clear that you can't imply a Parkinson's healthcare claim. We can say we did the study, and we can present the results of that study to experts. We have to let the word spread. We believe that the best way to be a trusted brand is to be a trustworthy company. That means do the research. That means have the quality be really high quality. We make the product. The manufacturing facility is in Pennsylvania. It's not in China. We double test it. We are a company that got regulatory approvals for this ingredient around the world, and we have over 90 patents. We walk the walk.
It is a conceit that we have had and continue to have that by doing that slowly, frustratingly slowly, eventually the word would break out that there is only really one good, effective, trustworthy brand in the entire NAD+ space. The only other thing that I want to point out is, what I worry about, well, there are a whole host of things I worry about. One of the things that I worry about is that NAD+, as it gains popularity, you see an influx of these fraudulent companies coming out saying, "We have NAD+. We have liposomal NAD+. We have this NAD+. We have that NAD+." They are all basically fraudulent. NAD+ itself is not bioavailable. There are zero studies that show if you swallow NAD+, it will elevate NAD+. You need to take a precursor that converts into NAD+ once it enters the cell.
NAD itself cannot enter the cell. Therefore, all of those companies that are advertising that you're talking about, they don't have any studies. They're just making false claims. Indeed, ChromaDex, Niagen Bioscience, we actually test all those products and publish the results on our website. The results are shocking about how many of those companies make false label claims. They don't even have in the bottle what they say is on the label. I worry that eventually the public will realize that these NAD+ companies are not real companies. They're just marketing companies making false claims. That will have an overall impact on the market itself as it grows. From our standpoint, we just take it brick by brick, one step at a time, and do the work and let the product speak for itself and the experts.
That's been our approach, and that is likely to continue to be our approach. I do recall once you called me, and we had a similar conversation. We're not adverse to making deals with celebrities, you know, and taking out and doing big campaigns. We have experimented with it from time to time. When a celebrity makes a deal with us, it's one that came to us as opposed to the other way around. They discovered the product, tried the product, and we talked to them, what was your experience? If we believe they're genuine, we're open to doing a deal. We've had conversations with some of the biggest names in the world. The offers we've made to them have been, you know, they've rejected because if it's just about money, it's not in line with our brand.
Maybe just talk a little bit back. I agree we were joking before we went live here, just what I've seen kind of on my Instagram feed. I mean, you do have, there are advertisers. You are advertising out there. Maybe we could discuss that effort, how that specifically has evolved.
The core of the business, the business itself is basically an e-commerce company. I mean, you know, the majority of our revenues come from our website and from Amazon. We have traditional performance marketing techniques where we have ROAS and retention metrics, and we create ads, and we do influencer ads and social media ads and convert them and retain them. That is the fundamental blocking and tackling of the business that we do. We do it fairly well. I just think that in the overall scheme of what the enterprise is, it's just a small piece of the enterprise when you see what the overall market potential is for something as significant as NAD+.
Ozan, I'd love to get you in the conversation too. I mean, this falls along this conversation, but there has been a nice positive inflection in the results lately. Can we talk about just kind of what's been driving that? That's also resulted in a nice positive reaction in the stock price too. Maybe we can talk about some of these near-term trends, what's actually happening in the business here.
Yeah, for sure. You know, the company, as Rob explained, we are the pioneers in this NAD+ space. With the marketing efforts that we're putting in, with the brand that we're putting out there, and the intellectual property that we have, and the moat that we've built, we've elevated the entire NAD+ space. Last year, in August, we've launched the Niagen Plus line, which is the IV product, and the at-home injectables are going to be coming up soon. With that, we've gotten a significant amount of press. We have a lot of celebrities, athletes, and influencers trying our products. That has, we've seen, created this halo effect, which has been Rob's strategy all along to do. We've seen the positive effect of that on our financial performance as well, and as a result, on our stock price.
Talk about, Rob, we talked about maybe the different products we have now, which is, as I know, Ozan, we have the IV product, but then you still sell the, I guess, what I would call the traditional, the legacy product as well. How is that all coming together from a product standpoint?
Really nicely. You know, right before you started this chat, you and I were talking about us visiting you where you are at presently with one of our nurses and offering you and perhaps your friends an IV at home or wherever you'd like it to be, in the office or an injection. We've been doing that now for about eight months that certain influential people that are interested in a Niagen IV, and a lot of people are interested, we have been giving it out for free. The people that have been doing it are very influential people, like seriously influential people.
Some of the most famous influential people in the world have been calling us asking, "Can I have a Niagen IV and a Niagen shot?" That is not an ad per se, but it definitely spreads the word, and it has been extremely effective for us as a marketing tactic. The thing works. People sometimes will go in for an NAD+ IV. They will go into a clinic and they will get an intravenous of an NAD+, of a gram, half a gram of NAD+. Here is the thing. NAD+ itself, the molecule NAD+, is not bioavailable. It is too large a molecule, and it has a phosphate group on the perimeter. It is unable to penetrate the cell. It actually creates all this inflammation and friction once you put it into your blood, and it tries to get into the tissue or into the cell. It takes them three hours to stare.
They break out in sweat. They have headaches. They have nausea. Yet there is this community of celebrities and athletes and biohackers and billionaires who still do it. Those people then try Niagen IV, which takes a few minutes, has no side effects, and has many times greater resulting NAD+ levels. They want the new stuff. They want the new stuff. The new stuff is Niagen. We knew that. We knew that 10 years ago that these people who were experimenting with NAD+, if they switched over to our molecule, would have a much better experience. That has been what Ozan is talking about. We have been offering that to people, including journalists and investors and celebrities, and they have been talking about it and writing about it.
It has had this impact on us as a brand and us as a company as people say, "Wow, Niagen is the right one. Niagen is the good one. Niagen is the new one." It is not really the new one. It is just new to them. That business has been growing at a nice trajectory. By the way, it took us many years to get regulatory approval to offer it via injection and IV. That is a whole different set of regulations and rules than dietary supplements. It is also pharmaceutical-grade Niagen. It is not food-grade like our supplements. It is a very different supply chain. It is a very different set of regulations. It took us many years to get here, five years, to get to where we are right now to offer it as a product. It is working as a product.
When we started it, what we didn't know is that this idea of self-injecting would become a mainstream idea. We didn't know about GLP-1s when we endeavored to do this. We just thought, "This thing will help people." We went to a conference in 2017. Charles Brenner and I went to this conference of people who were doing NAD+ IV, and there were people with addictions and depression and Parkinson's. We said, "You know what? If they think it's working for NAD+, wait till they try it with Niagen." We spent all this time testing it, getting it approved, getting regulatory approvals, patenting it, and studying it, and then figuring out how to make it and deliver it. In that time period, this Ozempic thing emerged.
Now we recognize that a potential opportunity for us, and one that we plan to work on, is if people are willing to inject themselves to get thin, we think they'd also be willing to inject themselves to get young. We have all this data to show that elevating your NAD+ levels with Niagen essentially makes your cells more vibrant, better able to heal, better able to create energy, basically a more youthful cell. Now we have all these age-related disease studies coming out that show that it has an impact. We did a press release today on a clinical study on a syndrome that advances aging in children that showed a major significant positive benefit to these kids. It works.
We're hoping that if we develop a product and we're able to sell it to people at their homes, that people will also, in addition to taking Tru Niagen as a supplement, will also be interested in self-injecting at home. We think the market potential for that is fairly significant.
Is that how, from a consumer standpoint, is that how it is going to, your core consumers would basically marry those two together, the oral supplement with the injectable?
I mean, some people will do one or the other. I do both. I think it depends on your age and your condition and your state and how much you take. When you inject it or when you do an IV, the amount that gets into the bloodstream is very high. If you just take an oral supplement, by the time it gets through the gut and all the acids in your gut and then through the liver and filters through the liver and then gets deposited into the bloodstream, it's a very small amount of actual Niagen that gets in there. It has an impact. If you take it every day, it adds up and accumulates. You sit down to do an injection or an IV, it elevates it literally within minutes.
Within two hours, it's actually passing through the blood into the tissue, across the blood-brain barrier and into whatever the damaged organ might be.
When would the injectable become a product that's widely available?
We think that we won't have a pen, the equivalent to the Ozempic pen, probably for a year. We think in the next few months, we'll have a vial and a small syringe that people can self-inject into themselves. We'll have that product produced and available. We are going to be looking to make deals with some of these telehealth companies that are presently selling some of these prescribed drugs online. Several of them are already quite interested.
Right now, it's basically at an abate of you're testing it.
Yeah. We have tested it, but I do not think it will be available for a few more months, widely available. It is also a business opportunity for us. We are not a telehealth company, but obviously, we are a consumer-facing company, and we have hundreds of thousands of people with whom we interact. We could conceivably develop this telehealth capability and sell the at-home injection product directly to the consumer as well. I think I am hopeful that we will have something along those lines by the end of the year.
As our time wraps down here, let's just maybe talk about the finances. You've maintained steady profitability. I guess it's not a very capital-intensive business. As you're looking at maybe to embark upon this new focus, I mean, how are you thinking about the financial side? Is there a need for capital?
No. There's no need for capital. We have plenty of cash, and we have no debt, and we're cash flow positive. I should also point out that there's a third shot on goal that's significant for this company. Aside from the brand, the branded Tru Niagen product and the IV injectable product, there's also the actual pharmaceutical opportunity here. This is a biotech company that's pursuing drug indications that if we were just a standalone drug company pursuing Parkinson's, and we were about to complete a phase III clinical Parkinson's study, this would be a very valuable biotech company. It's an increasing, it used to be that none of the investors understood that about us. We're starting to see many, many more sophisticated investors understand that the science here is quite real. You have a biotech company here that's cash flow positive.
Most of the time, you sit down with a biotech company and say, "How many quarters left of cash do you have?" Not us. We are pursuing several interesting indications. I mentioned Parkinson's, but there are others. We are doing it by maintaining a cash flow positive position.
Very good. Our time's winding down. Is there anything else we want to make sure we mention here before we say our goodbyes?
One thing is, I would say to you and to anybody who might be listening, if you're not interested in Niagen Bioscience as a stock or as an investment, that's fine. I urge you and your family to please go out and at least try either Tru Niagen or the Niagen Plus injectable at a local clinic. You can go to niagenplus.com, and we have a locator of clinics that might be in your area that might make it available. We think we have an opportunity here to generally improve people's health, especially as they age. That's a very exciting and fulfilling and rewarding opportunity. I would urge you to at least give it a try.
Rob, thank you. It was great seeing you again. Ozan, thank you. It was nice meeting you. We appreciate it. Congratulations on the recent success.
Thanks for including us, Brian. Really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Thank you, Brian.