His improved tobacco technology is universally used today. This technology has extended millions of lives around the world. I remember also when he entered into America’s largest patent lawsuit, by size of damages requested, with R J Reynolds Tobacco Company.

An associate of his, a world-renowned scientist, has since described him to me as “a force of nature.” It’s a good description. Without his drive and particular combination of curiosity, optimism, skills and character, this discovery might never have been made.

His has absolutely no doubt about the nutraceutical he has discovered. If you’re accustomed to speaking with extremely careful scientists, as I am, he’s nothing like that.

Nothing.

That evening in Palm Beach, he repeated to me the basic claims his friend had sent me. He said, though not in these words, that he had discovered a safe nutraceutical that controls the vicious cycle of inflammaging. At that point, I was smiling politely and listening. I still didn’t believe him, but he convinced me he was sincere.

He wasn’t lying, I figured. He was just wrong.

I was curious enough, however, to take him up on his offer to meet with scientists working with his technology in Sarasota, Florida, where he’s based. I had asked him questions that he didn’t have answers to so he encouraged me to “come up and see the lab, and talk to the scientists.”

Road Trip to Sarasota

Ray Blanco and I programmed the GPS locator and drove to Sarasota with the windows open. I was prepared to waste a day. We arrived at his office at the airstrip where he keeps his plane. On the way to the lab, he gave us the back story to his discovery.

His Virginia family had been associated with the tobacco industry for generations and he had seen cigarettes prematurely kill many friends and family. Wealthy from his biotech investments, he retired. Nearly by accident, however, he found himself the owner of a tobacco processing plant.

With the raw materials at hand and an insatiable curiosity, he started wondering if he might be able to make tobacco less dangerous. This was based on the fact that the tobacco plant itself contains no carcinogens. Only when it’s cured do the toxins form.

Eventually, he invented a superior processing technology using microwaves to speed the drying process, reducing carcinogenic toxin creation significantly. It wasn’t enough for him, though. He then set out to find a way to help people quit smoking entirely.

The standard smoking-cessation aid at the time, and today, is nicotine chewing gum.

Unfortunately, the success rate for nicotine gums is barely higher than normal chewing gum. You would probably be better off using a xylitol gum, a clinically validated nutraceutical.

He reasoned that there must be something in tobacco other than nicotine that draws people back to the whole tobacco plant product. He was not the only person to reach this conclusion, though he was the first person to methodically and earnestly look for the answer…

Yours for transformational profits,

Patrick Cox
for The Penny Sleuth

This CEO’s Next Move Could Leave You with Generations of Wealth… was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

I’ve been saying for a while that scientific progress is moving so fast that most people are unable to deal with the kinds of breakthroughs that are happening.

I’m even astonished.

I didn’t think we’d see some of the developments that have come to pass in the past months for many, many years.

Transformational breakthroughs have taken place across the scientific spectrum. But the most remarkable and important are in medical biotechs.

I say this because biotechnologies will have an impact not only on your wealth, but will make you healthier. The best way to get rich is to invest in a diversified portfolio containing transformational technologies… and then live a really long time.

Exponential portfolio growth will do the rest of the work.

Many of the breakthroughs I’m talking about will have a direct and dramatic impact on your healthy life span, or your “health span,” as well as your portfolio. There were many biotech breakthroughs this year.  They include what I believe are cures for virus-borne diseases and liver disease.

One that stands out particularly because they will drastically increase health spans.

It is a nutraceutical that contains anatabine citrate, a naturally occurring food substance found in solanaceous plants. It directly addresses auto[innate]immune disorders associated with chronic low-level inflammation. (I have written to you about nutraceuticals before. If you missed it, click here.)

“Game changer” may be an overused cliche, but this is really, truly that.

But before we get to what it is, here is why it is so important…

The “Inflammaging” Story

The name of the neural circuit that regulates the immune response to injury and invasion is the “inflammatory reflex.” Inflammation is a complex mechanism that involves the destruction of damaged cells. It heals of salvageable cells.  And aids in the growth of entirely new cells.

In the last decade or so, it has become more clear that inflammation plays a major complicating role in almost all diseases. When we are young, the primary role of this important biological response is to heal injury or infection.

Inflammation increases the rate of aging itself. It leads to various pathologies.

Chronic inflammation increases as you age. Eventually, it creates a problem serious enough to trigger a cascade effect. Uncontrolled inflammation causes the simultaneous healing and destruction of cells.

This can lead to: cancers, heart attacks, lupus, IBS, macular degeneration, stroke, obesity, ED, allergies, psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, endometriosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hair loss, diseases of the organs such as the thyroid and liver as well as…

Well, you name it.

Today, scientists have advanced the science much further. Many are now using the term “inflammaging,” coined by Claudio Franceschi, professor of immunology at the University of Bologna.

It appears that our immune systems react to the normal effects of aging as if they were injuries. This initiates inflammation, an immune response. This inflammation causes cellular stress, which increases the degree of chronic. It is, by definition, an auto-immune disorder. Some scientists call it auto[innate]immunity subclinical syndrome.

It is a vicious circle, a chronic cycle that spins faster and faster until the organism itself eventually fails. Aging, we now know, is not linear. Like so many other things, it is a process that accelerates over time.

However, if there were a way to stop chronic low-level inflammation we could put the breaks on the auto-immune inflammation cycle. If we could stop chronic low-level inflammation. Our bodies could heal naturally.

We would even see cells damaged by past inflammation-related diseases heal normally.

We’re not talking about regenerative medicine.

Regenerative medicine promises to replace aged cells and tissue with young telomere-restored cells and tissue. An alternative route is the activation of the telomerase gene, which we know can restore telomeres to youthful lengths.

In the meantime, however, we need to slow the process of telomere loss. For some time scientists have known that inflammation is the primary accelerator of telomere loss. This is why so few of us reach our theoretical maximum life spans— which could be 120 years or more.

We would be much, much more likely to reach that theoretical upper limit if we aged as we did when we were young. A drug that actually controlled inflammaging would restore the aging process to a more linear progression.

For this reason, many scientists are looking for the means to reduce or stop inflammaging.

Not infrequently, this hypothetical drug has been referred to as the “holy grail” of drug discovery.

The Market Potential

The market for such a compound would be so big it is nearly unimaginable. Lipitor, technically atorvastatin, does lower indicators of inflammation. The most well-known, because doctors can test for it easily, is C-reactive protein (CRP). CRP levels rise with inflammation and their reduction demonstrates lowered inflammation. As a result, Lipitor is known to reduce the danger of cardiovascular and other diseases for many people.

Measured by sales, Lipitor is the most successful drug in history. Last year, Pfizer sold over $5 billion of Lipitor. This is despite a broad range of adverse effects and competing anti-inflammatory statins. At its peak in 2006, Pfizer was earning almost $13 billion annually from Lipitor.

This compound is far more effective than Lipitor or the other statins while being safer and cheaper. That, my friends, is the holy grail of modern medicine so many scientists are seeking.

More unbelievable still, they’re saying it isn’t even a drug in the legal sense. The holy grail is an extremely safe nutraceutical — a food that all of us consume in small quantities regularly. (If you’re already a Breakthrough Technology Alert member, you can get the full report here.)

[The Sleuth’s Note: There are many ways to start your own research on up and coming biotech companies. One great place to start is by using Google Scholar. It gives you access to all the latest research and studies being done. Click here for the quick search of up and coming inflammation drugs. You may just find the next Lipitor...]

Sincerely.

Patrick Cox
Penny Sleuth

Profiting from the “Holy Grail” of Medicine was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

However this technology is in the very early stages. This company is so disruptive, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the industries it will disrupt will try to discredit or stop the product. Moreover, we don’t yet have long-term double-blind human studies on the use of this substance.

On the other hand, there isn’t blinded human data for quite a few of my recommendations in Breakthrough Technology Alert drug candidates. This isn’t unique. There is, however, something about this product that inspired in me a particular degree of skepticism and caution. I assume, therefore, that it may provoke the same skepticism in you. Specifically, this company’s product is a “nutraceutical.”

Nutraceuticals vs. Drugs

Nutraceuticals are foods or food-derived products meant to provide health benefits. They may function exactly like substances considered drugs legally, but they are not categorized as drugs.

For example, you may take or sell the extract of willow bark for use as an anti-inflammatory, anti-clotting agent or painkiller without getting government permission. You can’t make medical claims about willow bark extract, or the active ingredient, salicylic acid, however. Current government policy in the U.S. and some other countries reserves that right for products that have passed extremely lengthy and expensive procedures.

If you synthesize a very similar compound, acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin, you have a drug. With regulatory approval, you can, therefore, make certain kinds of claims regarding its efficacy in the prevention of heart attacks or strokes. There is very little difference in the actual function of the two products, though.

One other difference is in the realm of patent law. Drugs can be patented, period. Nutraceuticals can be patented for specific uses only.

Because nutraceuticals are not subject to testing requirements and regulations, they are much easier to bring to market. In some instances, impure and even dangerous nutraceuticals have been widely sold. The FDA can force a product off the market if it is found to be harmful, but the agency does not have legal authority to require clinical testing.

There are incredibly important and effective nutraceuticals. Omega-3 fatty acids, in both the fish oil extract and the purified synthesized form, are linked by real data to improved health. The nutraceutical form of vitamin D is also an important supplement with clinically verified health benefits. If your circulating levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D are below 45 ng/ml, I would strongly recommend that you speak with a doctor who keeps up with the scientific literature.

I’m telling you all this for a reason. I recently recommended a company that has nutraceutical products to my Breakthrough Technology Alert subscribers. I’m convinced that this is one of the most important breakthrough technologies of our time. I won’t pretend, however, that we’re not in the Wild Wild West of investing when we venture into nutraceutical territory.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though.

The same dynamics that make this area volatile and unpredictable can also lead to enormous profits…

Yours for transformational profits,
Patrick Cox
Penny Sleuth

May 23, 2011

The Disruptive Technology Could Bring You Transformational Wealth was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

I’d like to give you a heads-up regarding an important and fascinating new technological convergence. For some time, nanotech researchers have been studying biological structures, looking for ways to integrate nature’s processes into the next generation of computing devices. Our brains, after all, are the most powerful computers in existence.

Earlier this month, in fact, New York University chemists created 3-D structures out of strands of DNA. By creating “sticky ends” on the DNA strands, they were able to get them to self-assemble into 3-D shapes large enough to be visible to the naked eye. These researchers believe that this ability could lead to major improvements in the ability to manufacture nano-sized electronics.

Others have also investigated the utility of DNA in manufacturing electronics. DNA has many advantages as a molecular building block. DNA is relatively well studied and understood, and it is both tough and flexible. It has been recently used to construct box-like structures, light-driven nano-sized motors, carbon nanotube wrapping for tissue replacement and a way to bind together gold nanoparticles to create sheets.

Caltech is responsible for a major breakthrough in this area — “DNA origami.” This is a technique that causes single strands of viral DNA to self-assemble with short synthetic strands. This self-assembly allows scientists to fold viral DNA into precise shapes such as squares, triangles and stars. These structures have the width of the DNA double helix.

IBM, in turn, used the origami technique to build nano-sized DNA “scaffolding” or miniature circuit boards. These “lithographic templates” could be integrated into conventional semiconductor fabrication techniques and used to install the smallest components yet devised. IBM has, in fact, pinned down the conditions that would allow the use of these DNA tools in traditional chip fabrication processes.

Moore’s Law, it appears, is safe for the foreseeable future. But that’s not all. Bio/nano structures are not being used only to bring the power of biology to computers. They are bringing the power of computers to biology. Recently, hybrid bio/nano circuits were constructed by researchers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They coated nanowire-sized transistors with a lipid membrane similar to those found in our own cells. This means that the same complex biochemical processes that open and close channels in our cell membranes can be replicated in electronics.

By introducing proteins onto the lipid layer of their hybrid circuits, the researchers were able to create channels similar to those that exist in the cell membrane. By controlling the voltage in the nanowire transistors, they were able to make these channels open and close.

This technology holds enormous promise. It could be used to create medical prosthetics such as cochlear implants that can be implanted in the body to interact directly with the nervous system. They could also be used in a new generation of biosensing devices for use in medical diagnostics.

At present, there isn’t a publicly available path to invest in this technology – but that could change very soon. I’ll let you know when the situation changes…

For transformational profits,
Patrick Cox
Penny Sleuth

April 13, 2010

Profit as Biotech and Nanotech Converge with Semiconductor Industry was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

Mencken had a genius for stating overlooked truths. One, which I’ll paraphrase, is that we all know that the media get it wrong when they’re covering our areas of expertise. Then, defying logic, we believe the media when it covers something outside our fields. There are exceptions, of course, but his observation is too often true.

This is the case, by the way, not only for the newspapers and networks. Even the more respected scientific journals are making huge mistakes. If you subscribe to Nature, you may have seen the recent article titled “Virus-free pluripotency for human cells.” The authors write, “For the first time, specialized human cells have been transformed into a state similar to that seen in embryonic stem cells, without using viruses.”

If you’ve been reading Breakthrough Technology Alert for any length of time, you know this is not true. In fact, there was one doctor who accomplished this virus-free transformation several years ago…

I suppose I should actually be happy when journalists get it wrong. It means that my readers are among the very few people outside of the scientists doing the research who know what’s really going on.

Incidentally, my colleague Chris Mayer once took a group of us to the bar, not far from Agora Financial headquarters, where Mencken often drank. Let me give you one more quote from the Sage of Baltimore. He wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety).”

The new administration is now saying the economy is “fundamentally sound.” Since it mocked Sen. McCain for saying the same thing before the election, we are being asked to believe that the stimulus bill has fixed the problem.

Unfortunately, this is not true. I agree that the economy is sound in the sense that it will overcome the damage done by the political classes. Most stocks, though, continue to suffer. The evaporation of investment capital is even more of a problem. Some startups and small-caps that would have succeeded wildly will not survive.

That’s why I’ve always diversified into transformational stocks. If you had bought into the leading six or seven computer companies at the start of the computer revolution, more than half would have failed, but the winners would have made you rich.

It’s important to remember that there are several sectors now that will be bigger than computers. Stem cells is one of them, but so are RNAi and nanotechnology. Don’t be alarmed. Don’t mistake temporary problems for long-term trends.

The people who are getting their cues from the mainstream media have bid up stem cell companies, including the wrong ones. For that reason, I’m going back to RNA interference in the next issue. This industry is making miraculous progress toward controlling the genetic switches that cause most diseases.

Sincerely,
Patrick Cox

March 19, 2009

How Transformational Biotech Will Make You Richer Than Early Computer Investors was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

There are two main aspects, I said.

First, these companies are all trying to improve people’s lives. Some are searching for treatments or cures for some of the worst diseases that plague society. Others are looking for better, cheaper ways to deliver those treatments to different parts of the world.

Second is the “pop.” Millions of investors watch these tiny biotechs as they begin clinical trials, announce partnerships with big pharmaceutical firms and submit new drug applications with the FDA. And millions more scramble to buy shares when good news is announced.

This good news can send the share price through the roof in a matter of hours. Naturally, it’s nice to already be sitting on shares while everyone else is still uncertain about the company’s future.

With these two points in mind, let’s examine a $260 million biotech I’ve been watching…

For the past several years, Inspire Pharmaceuticals (ISPH: NASDAQ) has proven to be very skilled at losing money. But now, it could be turning a corner with several new drugs in its pipeline.

One of its most promising candidates is a yet-unnamed drug aimed to treat cystic fibrosis patients. Cystic fibrosis, or CF, is a hereditary disease that causes lung and pancreas problems, eventually causing disability and early death.

Inspire’s CF candidate is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials and has been granted orphan drug status. This designation is handed down by the FDA to encourage the development of drugs for rare (or “orphan”) diseases affecting less than 200,000 people in the United States.

Orphan drugs have relatively small demand, so the FDA grants companies that produce them some perks. If Inspire’s new CF drug is granted approval, the company will have seven years to exclusively market the drug. That’s seven years and millions of dollars that no one else will be allowed to touch.

Another new drug in the works at Inspire is called Bilastine, an allergy drug comparable to Pfizer’s popular drug Zyrtec. Inspire bought the rights to develop Bilastine from Faes Farma, presumably to compliment other allergy medications in its portfolio.

Currently, Inspire markets along with the company Allergan two drugs that treat dry-eye and allergies. Inspire’s own dry-eye drug — called Prolacria — is still waiting for approval from the FDA. Approval for this drug has been delayed in the past, so it would not be wise to consider this a lock by any stretch of the imagination.

Of course, any negative news relating to Prolacria and it’s approval will negatively affect the short-term price of Inspire. It’s very difficult to judge how trained doctors and other experts will view a certain drug. From what we’ve seen, its unnamed cystic fibrosis drug is a much more promising candidate. However, this drug is not as far along as Prolacria in the approval process.

When weighing your options with this company (or one like it), it is important to project different scenarios that could play out in order to determine the best course of action.

In this case, we have a $260 million drug developer that’s been losing money for some time. It has enough cash to carry it through a couple more years, and very little debt. Its revenue grew to $37 million last year, besting 2005 by about 60%.

There’s our foundation. Now we have two separate scenarios for Inspire and how it will affect us if we were to invest…

In our first scenario, Inspire’s dry-eye drug Prolacria passes additional FDA scrutiny and is granted approval. Its unnamed CF drug follows suit 18 months later and affords the company yet another revenue stream. Inspire gains its financial footing sooner than most expected, and its share price rises.

The second scenario is not as pleasant. In this one, major flaws are found with Prolacria and the drug is dropped altogether. Shares take an immediate hit and do not begin to recover until promising news about the CF drug’s progress emerges months, if not a year or two later. The company begins turning a profit in a few years with the help of this drug and Bilastine, which begins to earn a small share of the allergy medication market.

These two scenarios, while different, are both equally possible. Each one has Inspire emerging from the red, just at different times.

While any investor would immediately hope for the first option, it’s important to be prepared for the second. This isn’t a stock to pick if you’re only willing to settle for fast gains.

Best,
Gunner
March 26, 2007

Small-Cap Medical Companies was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.