Gillete, old spice & secret + oral, page-10

On the topic of "oral healthcare", Kiwi is right to highlight its significance. This latest update finally discloses that P&G is interested in it as active ingredients are now currently being tested in the OBJ laboratory. Too often, when holders think of OBJ's potential in the oral care market, they think of the fizzled out partnership with GSK that occurred many many years ago when, after 10 years of considering the benefits of using OBJ's micro-array technology in manual toothbrushes, they made the commercial decision not to pursue it because the benefits were not statistically significant. And so the idea of OBJ's oral health care technology application has been much maligned ever since ... until now.

P&G is obviously interested in the oral healthcare technology as disclosed by this latest update. There is also much more information that suggests it is a far more commercially significant application than we might think from that very brief reference to it in the update.

Recall that OBJ has been vigorously pursuing separate patent protection for its Delivery of Oral Care Device for many years. The patent specification can be found here. It would appear to be largely the same micro-array technology as is covered by OBJ's skin care patents, except obviously tailored for oral care devices including: (1) toothbrush heads; (2) strips (e.g. whitening strips). In relation to (1), although GSK abandoned pursuit of the manual toothbrush, I do recall Jeff saying at the AGM 2 years ago that electric toothbrushes present an entirely different situation as the oscillations of the brush head significantly increase the effective delivery via the magnetic micro-array - think of the MAGNETIC BOOSTER and the 7000 pulses per minute transferred to an electric toothbrush.

OBJ announced that this oral care patent had first been granted by the Japan Patent Office on 27 January 2016, inconspicuously noted at the end of the Quarterly Report (reproduced below).




OBJ then informed us that the oral care patent had been granted by the United States patent office on 12 October 2016, also noting that granting of the patent will be "welcomed by OBJ's partners".



I conducted a check to see where the oral care patent is at in other national patent offices. It is also being pursued very actively in the European Patent Office with examination of the application apparently just having commenced (see documents reproduced below). This has taken years, and the continued pursuit of this by OBJ, including annual renewal fees being paid, indicates its importance to OBJ. Apart from the skin care patents (which underpin the 3 products we have already seen come on to the market), in my opinion OBJ has not pursued any of its other patents so vigorously as it has with this one - the Oral Health Care patent. This, I think, points to the inevitability of oral health care products incorporating OBJ technology being rolled out in the not-too-distant future. Don't be surprised when it happens.