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There is a company in the United States called Emisphere Technologies, whose entire business is to re-make injectable drugs orally avaialble.

They have had a roller coaster ride with their share price varying from just over $1 to about $85. This would be equivalent to MBP bouncing between 10 cents and $8.50 and back. Their share price is now about $5.

This is in the face of required warnings issued last June that they would not be able to continue operations past September without cash infusions.

They have had clinical and pre-clinical success with a wide range of proteins and other drugs that are normally destroyed in the digestive tract. They have a number of partnerships with large drug companies who are sponsoring the Emisphere per-clinical and clinical research. This provides a modest cash flow, and holds the potential for larger cash flows in the future if any of their projects achieve commercialization.

I think that the technology Emisphere is using is fundamentally different to the one that is used by Metabolic, and appears to potentially add costs to manufacture, as it appears to use certain compounds to mask or alter in some way protect the active drug as it passes through the diestive tract and is absorbed into the bloodstream. These protective compounds dissappear leaving the intact drug molecule ready to go to work. The point is that all the costs of manufacturing and ataching these protective compounds are entirely additive to the cost of manufaturing the active drug.

The drugs delivered with this technology are identical to the injected version.

It seems that MBPs technology might be cheaper as it seems to rely on alteration to the moleculat structure of the drug itself, and might not wind up any more expensive that the manufacturing costs of the native injectible drug.

There could be some interest in this in the near term if Metabolic can show a proof of principle. They also need strong patent protection for this process. One would hope that they have taken appropriate steps.