melbourne presentation q & a

Melbourne presentation Q & A. This is mostly verbatim, but a few parts are missing, and a few that weren't completely clear have been edited to convey the meaning as well as I could understand it. Uninformative parts such as "that's a very good question" have been deleted.

COMPETITION
Q. Do you have any competitors? I’ve heard of a few companies who are also trying to put out cancer-curing...?

A. There’s 8000 companies trying to cure cancer around the world, and various types of drugs and other aspects. But there’s a lot of different cancers. Do we have competitors? We have no competitors in Biosilicon because we control it. We have competitors in areas of the business. So for someone who’s using a polymer to deliver a drug for schizophrenia in one way, the drug delivery system is a competitor to us, but I explained the benefit of this technology over that. So in each of these discrete areas there’s a competitor, other than something like pancreatic cancer where there’s no known need. So there’s different levels of competitors, but I explained the benefits of this material, and there’s no one that can do this material.


FUNDING FOR USA EXPANSION
Q. How are you going to get the cash to fund the USA expansion?

A. Well, we’ve got the cash we’d need for the various trials. We’ve got the ADR. In terms of the US expansion, we’re not looking to buy a public company. We may acquire some private facilities. That may be an equity issue at some point, a small discrete one to secure that. That would be locked in of course. The ADR can be used to secure the right sort of people we need to join us. I think the question you’re really asking is, are you going to do a raising? We don’t need cash at the moment. We have expected revenues coming in for what we’re trying to do. It is always possible that a raising could be done for some reasons. One reason may be a strategic investor, someone like a big pharma or multinational that we give a block to to cement a relationship. Five percent of the stock on the market might send the price up too high, so they may get 3 or 4 percent in a placement and buy 1 percent on the market. That’s a possibility. I’m not ruling these things out, but there’s nothing under contemplation in that regard.


TREATING OTHER CANCERS
Q. We’re currently doing studies in liver cancer. What other parts of the body would you go to? Lung cancer, would it work in there?

A. This is for the Brachysil product. We know we can do liver, and we believe we can do secondary liver because it’s metastatic, it’s smaller tumours spread out in the liver. We’ll probably then go to the pancreas, which is an unmet need. Ovarian we probably can do, but the problem with ovarian is that it’s diagnosed late in the day, and this product is known to extend life and quality of life so there is a possibilty. Breast cancer is a possibility, primarily for pre-op or post-op and secondaries or recurring breast cancers. You want to go into areas where there’s not a lot of competition, so we do those things first. Bladder is a definite possibility, the only issue is that we have to make sure we can actually find the tumours in the bladder using ultrasound. By the way, Biosilicon being a metallic element shows up on X-ray, so when you’ve injected it you know where it is, whereas polymers you don’t, and also it shows up on ultrasound, which is very unusual.

Q. How come it can cure the liver but not other parts?

A. Oh it can. The P32 will kill any tumour. It doesn’t matter where it is, it will kill it. The question is, can you get it in there, and so for something like ovarian, if it’s diagnosed early, yes. But to put a product on the market for ovarian cancer, you’d rather wait until there’s a diagnostic kit that found ovarian cancers early so you had a bigger market. As much as we would like to help people out in their suffering, we have to do this as a business first. In terms of pancreatic, that’s probably what we’ll do next. We’re pretty sure we can do head and neck, bladder and brain, but brain is actually a smaller market. We talk to all the clinicians and ask them, what do you need? So rather than us say, this is what you need, we ask them what they need. I’ll give you an example with a cytotoxic. Chlorambucil is a very good chemo agent as a cell killer, but it has horrible side effects, and the reason is that it’s taken systemically. The current market leader is Taxol, which has less side effects, but is also taken systemically. So we can go to the clinicians and say, we can load Chlorambucil and keep it safe in the body. It will still do a great job, better than Taxol, but we can also do Taxol: which one do you want? And their response is, we want Taxol because everyone knows Chlorambucil has bad side effects. But we know we’re not going to have the side effects. And they say, yes we know that but we give the patients what they want, what the industry’s looking at, so you don’t fight those things.


IMMUNE RESPONSE TO BIOSILICON
Q. In vivo, does the immune response have any effect on Biosilicon?

A. All the data we have to date shows that we have the benefit of the silicon not interacting with the drug. With polymers for example, there’s polymerization at the site where the polymer can interfere with the drug’s action. We know that if you have too much Biosilicon released into silicic acid, too much silicic acid coming into the body, it is simply processed through the kidneys like if you took too much vitamin C.

Q. Are the particles engulfed by white cells?

A. The question here is understanding the nanotechnology aspects and whether the white blood cells, the body is attacking it. This is a nanotechnology where what we put into the body is actually micron-sized, so the Brachysil is 20 microns, but each 20-micron fleck or powder is nano-structured inside. That’s the nanotechnology aspect, so when that dissolves it dissolves into silicic acid in its normal form, which the body uses to take up calcium as a catalytic reaction.


U.S. MARKET
Q. In relation to your march towards the US market. Is it a folly or the right thing to do? For example, other Australian companies with platform technologies, -------- with membrane separation, Ambri with biosensors, and also Biota. They all marched to that market and they basically got hammered.

A (partial). And there’s a reason for that. If you look at each one of those companies and analyse why you’ll find out very quickly. --------, there’s some issues with the way that they did that and the groups they were doing it with…


AION DIAGNOSTICS
Q. With AION, and your development ---- platform, how different is it from what Ambri was trying to do?

A. Ambri is a blood detection, fast acceleration kit, so instead of having to wait for results to come back from the lab it can be done very quickly on the spot. AION has a range of applications. Silicon has a range of properties, which are thermal, optical, semiconductor. You can interrogate it. It has a refractive index. This bit of silicon here, we can make that when it’s nanostructured whatever colour you want. If you want it to be cream, the colour of skin you can do that, or if you want it to be pink, you can do all those things. It’s optical interrogation. You load that with an antibody and have something the size of a freckle in the skin. If you’ve had a cancer and you’re worried whether it’s coming back or not, then the idea is that the antigens produced by the cancer will bind with the antibodies in the silicon, and that changes the surface, the refractive index, so when you read it with a laser pen you get a different reading. It’s telling you very simply that something’s different and that something different is in that area. It’s not about point of hospital tools so much as about things which can be longer-acting in the body. However, there will be news on AION when patents are done in relation to some hospital tools, which are very innovative. But one of the things about diagnostics is that it needs to be cheap. It needs to cheap and disposable pretty much, and the money you make on anything on a machine is basically the reusable, not the machine itself. But we’re not quite in that business. We’re into, essentially longer term type diagnostics, ongoing.


DEALS WITH PARTNERS
Q. When would you expect collaborative deals with people like Epitan and C3 to be announced?

A. We probably do need to get some general update on some of these collaborations. Epitan are working with their peptide. We know we can load and release their peptide. They are currently working with a polymer, which has certain issues attached to it. It’s not ideal but it’ll get them to the market very quickly because it’s already an approved polymer. They’re looking to have something beyond that. We have an ongoing program with them. We know we can load and release the peptide. The next question is putting that peptide into a Biosilicon formulation into a long-acting implant. So you don’t really want to get a suntan but have to have cosmetic surgery to fix up ---------. So that’s what we’re looking at and we’ve said to Epitan that we could probably tell the market where we are at. I think they were at that point discussing with a pharma and they wanted to keep things relatively quiet. But we will get something out on that. In terms of C3, C3’s had focus on, a lot of different focuses at the moment. We’ve given them the products to work on and we’ve told them we can make them different colours, but they’ve been very slow in working on it, and the reason why we’re not pushing it is because it’s very much non-core for us. Wound management is a high volume, low margin business and we’re doing it with C3 because it would be a good product for them. For us it doesn’t make a lot of difference…
(part missing)
...of learning how to work with their product. Peptides are not easy to get, and they’re expensive, and we wanted to know how we could deal with peptides, and one great way of doing it is to work with Epitan. It’s good for them, it’s good for us, and they pay the costs.


MANAGEMENT TEAM
Q. On your management sheet you had about eleven names and you said you’re very proud of their abilities. If I take that as read, what proportion of that management team have strong business experience and what proportion are separately experimental experience. You are an experimental company, but a company survives on its business management. And an adjunct question, how often do you get that group in the one room?

A. Business experience, I have capital market experience. Brimblecombe has run the world’s biggest lab, so he has that aspect, and also the marketing side what’s needed. Aston has run biotechs before, about three or four of them. So the three of us have the strong business experience. So that’s the business core, plus also Mark Parry-Billings and Jill Ogden have business experience, particularly Jill on the product sales, commercialization and licensing and all of those sorts of things. The others, we have about 23 in Malvern, two hours west of London, of which fifteen are PhDs. Most of those, not including Roger Brimblecombe or Roger Aston, most of those are on the technical side. In terms of where is everyone, Roger’s in Malvern, I’m here, Roger’s in Australia, Leigh is in Malvern, Anna’s in Australia, those (another) four are in Malvern and Beng Choo is in Singapore, and we’ve got another two coming to Singapore fairly shortly. And how often do we get together? Well, this week all of those people are in Malvern going through various things. I’m not there because I’m doing this today. Otherwise I’d probably be there. I’m basically a summary of what all these people do.


U.S. BASE
Q. Whereabouts are you likely to locate in the U.S. and what sort of people are you looking for there?

A. In the US there’s a number of programs by state governments to get companies to come to where they are. We’ve had strong approaches from Pennsylvania and Indiana. Others like California have suggested that we need to be there because we’re silicon and they take for granted that we’ll turn up there because of that. But La Hoya is a very expensive place, the biotech centre of the US. We don’t need to be in expensive Boston or La Hoya because we’re a drug delivery company. We need to be near the drug companies, so that’s closer to the north-east corridor, around the New Jersey sort of area. So these aren’t fashionable places but that’s where we need to be. It’s likely that we’ll do more things in the Indiana area. Someone’s already starting the diagnostics. They have Roche, -----, some very big corporations there. So that’s the sort of area that we’ll be.


DEVELOPMENT PERIOD FOR DRUG DELIVERY
Q. Will there be a lengthy development and testing period required for each different drug that someone wants to load into Biosilicon?

A. If we have a relationship with a large pharma and they are using an existing, approved drug, what we have to show is that the drug still works, works as well if not better, that there are no safety issues that come up, and that’s a smaller trial. And the FDA will determine how big are the trials according to what the drug is for. If it’s for arthritic knees, it’s a longer, bigger trial because that’s not life-threatening. If it’s for advanced cancer then it’s a short trial, but that may be two to three years. If on the other hand it’s a brand-new drug which has never been used, then it could be ten years, but the important thing for us is that we get an up-front payment, which is significant in terms of our capital base. We get milestone payments as we go through the process and if they get the approval then royalties come beyond that. (Shows a table showing what these kinds of deals are worth.) These are all drug delivery deals done recently. ----- these increase the availability of the drug. This is the sugar crystal rather than the sugar cube approach. ---- polymer-type companies; they have discrete products in a certain area only, whether it might be subcutaneous, injection, it could be inhalation. Large partners, and the figures that you see here depend entirely is the delivery system to the product. Can the product be delivered without it, or is it just 50 percent better. How big is the drug and is the delivery system part of the patent process with the drug. And you can see that it ranges from half a million dollars up to 20, 30 million-dollar upfront payments and royalties between 8 and 15, 20 percent. It is a range, but these are sizeable amounts relative to our capital base. It may be that what we can do is license this technology on a drug by drug basis or an application by application basis. So we don’t have a technology that lends itself solely to subcutaneous or only to oral. It’s across the board, so we have more flexibility in some of the licensing.

Q. How convenient can it be to have a drug delivered by Biosilicon? I would think that convenience is a big factor in the way people take drugs.

A. This brings out some cultural issues. ----, for example, does inhalation. For some reason the Americans don’t like inhaling things, whereas in Europe they’re quite happy with that. That’s one way of delivering something, so that’s a question of convenience and choice. We can do a range. We can do coatings, implants, we can do oral; it won’t dissolve in the stomach, it will go through the intestine before it releases. Whatever the convenience is for the drug, we believe we can provide that convenience. It’s also the gold standard. If the gold standard is a massive needle into the muscle, you don’t have to go to the nth degree. You just have to go to a small needle somewhere else to beat that standard, to get that share of the market.


EXTENDING PATENTS
Q. Can some of the patents be extended?

A. Can patents be extended for other companies, on drugs coming off patent. Seventeen of the world’s top twenty drugs are coming off patent in the next number of years. Different commentators range that between 60 and 80 billion US dollars. I think data models had it at 80 just recently. That’s a lot of drugs coming off patent. If you can show that a new delivery system is either safer, easier to take or it’s more effective, then you can take that generic and combine with a different delivery system, and then get a new 10-year-plus patent on it. The typical scenario is: Mr Jones goes down to the doctor and the doctor says, well Mr Jones you’ve been taking this version of the drug for a long time. It’s just become generic. You can now buy a black-and-white version for a dollar a pill. However, the new improved version in the colourful pack is out and it works 20 percent better and it’s five dollars a pill. And people say, it’s my health so I’ll take the five-dollar one, particularly if it’s reimbursed by the government.

Q. How close is --------?

A. On the localized chemo we can take ----- and Taxol. We can put them into a product without paying royalties to someone else. We can get a patent position on that. With P32 we’re doing that. It’s registered as ----- by the FDA, as a (treatment) of last resort, because of the way it’s used we can put it safely in something and hold it safe in the body and that’s a new patent position, which we have. That’s a brand-new 20-year patent because of the novel use of it.


AFFORDABILTY OF PRODUCTS
Q. How affordable will the drugs be for the general public?

A. Affordability is a community question. From a community perspective, the government will often want to make drugs as cheap as possible, but you can’t have new drugs, new delivery systems unless the money that shareholders put into the research is returned. So, we don’t talk about the sort of margins that we have because we don’t want to give the impression that we’re overcharging, for example, but we then recover (the cost) and give our shareholders a return. But the margins in this sort of business, Brachysil, we can undercut the margins that are out there significantly and still do very well.


SIRTEX
Q. You have mentioned Sirtex in some of your announcements. I believe the comparison…?

A. We get compared to Sirtex. We don’t refer to them in any of our announcements, but I can tell you about Sirtex. They have a secondary liver cancer (product). They claim a market of about three billion dollars in that. That’s from their own documents. What they do is take yttrium 90, which an isotope, radiotherapy, coat that around a ceramic bead. That’s injected into the hepatic artery and drawn up through capillary action, through blood flow, into a tumour, and the idea is that you kill the blood supply to the tumour. So, what are the benefits of this product over that? I’ll go through a number of them. One, because of the manner of delivery into the hepatic artery the product is somewhat limited to liver cancer, and the products they’ve got underneath it, I think there’s another three, I think they’re all designed towards secondary liver cancers. Yttrium 90 has a wider kill range than P32, so you’re potentially killing healthy tissue as well as tumour. The P32 is more discrete, so that’s a benefit. The other benefit is that yttrium 90 has a 64-hour half-life, which means you’ve got 64 hours to get it from reactor to patient, which means that Sirtex have relationships to create their product in different continents, because they’ve got a very small treatment window. Some of the other competitors, not just Sirtex, take ----- on prostate. They’re using titanium seeds, where they have in the titanium seed iodine 125, another isotope. Those titanium seeds are expensive and engineered and they are punched into the prostate. You couldn’t do that for another organ because you’ll give it significant bruising and damage. But iodine 125 has a half-life measured in months, which means that after it’s finished doing what it’s doing, it’s still killing tissue. Now P32 is the ideal isotope because it an 8-millimetre clearly defined kill range and a 14-day half-life. We’ve got 14 days to get it from the reactor in Germany to anywhere in the world, which gives us a five-day treatment window. So logistically it’s very good, and in terms of the treatment regimen it’s very good because you can have the product exhausted when it’s finished doing its work rather than staying there for a much longer time. Sirtex have pioneered the market in that treatment they’re doing. They’re getting recovery for the cost of their product, and that’s a good thing because we are coming up behind them.


ARTHRITIS TREATMENT
Q. Is anything being done in delivery of arthritis drugs, such as -------?

A. We are looking at that but we haven’t got any firm data on it yet. But I can tell you that, the Taxol example, people are looking at putting Taxol into arthritic joints to ease the pain by killing some of the cells around it. We are looking into areas where can have a significant advantage by reducing side effects, and that is a potentially good one.


LIQUIDITY ON NASDAQ
Q. What milestones do you expect that will improve liquidity on the Nasdaq market?

A. The reason we did the roadshow so quickly was to create awareness, around a whole group of people. Roger Aston did some meetings, then I came in and did various meetings, and Anna Kluczewska came in after that and did some meetings. Roger Aston is coming in this week to see some more on his way back to Australia. That’s ongoing. We saw a range of mid-tier brokers. We saw some very high net-worth individuals as well as very large funds. And we indicated to them that the sorts of things they could expect to see over the next number of months would something like this: We would expect to try to get into the Merrill Lynch nanotech index. That’s happened, so tick. That’something we said we think we might be able to do, and it’s happened very quickly. Everyone we see will get that message very clearly from us and from our PR groups in the US. We’ve also indicated that we should be able to give an update on our top-5 global pharma before much longer. I can’t give you an exact time, but before much longer we’ll get an update on that. We indicated that we’re doing something in the non-core area, and the Puretech announcement came out; that’s another tick. We indicated that we’ll have finished our multi-injector at some point in the next month or so, which will be the case. And then we’ll announce that we’ll be starting our phase IIB dose optimization studies together. That’s towards the end of June. These are the sorts of things they’re looking for. Sometimes we’ll have ongoing patents and sometimes patents move the market. It just depends on what the market’s looking for at the time. There’s a number of milestones which they will see, and different people come in at different levels. We’ve already seen some liquidity just from the retail side in the US.


TOP-5 PHARMA
Q. What would be the setback for pSivida if the top-5 pharma pulled out?

A. One, we don’t expect that at all. We don’t do these things unless we believe we can do them. It’s a possibility that, say, they pull out because they’re no longer going to be in that product range. They might say, we’re no longer doing schizophrenic drugs, for example. That’s a possibility. That’s something we can’t control. That’s their decision, but we would expect that if that was going to happen we would be able to announce that we’re doing something else with them, because they’ve seen the benefits of the technology and how it works. I can’t legislate for everything, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.


DIRECTORS’ OPTIONS AND SHARES
Q. There’s been a lot of selling of options by management and those close to management. Why?

A. The options were about to expire. There hasn’t been a lot of selling of them. They’ve been held for five years. The directors needed to sell some of the options to pay for the conversion. We asked a European fund manager to take a small part of those. They said that they would take all of them or nothing, and we said they’re not for sale. I said, look, if we do sell them that’s negative for the market. I’d rather do this as one group so it’s tight, it’s done. The options are exercised. The options had to be exercised, you know that? And we’re not going to let them expire worthless. They wanted all or nothing. In fact they wanted more than there was, and you look at the register and you’ll see that not one of those shares has been sold. So they’ve been exercised and they’ve been kept. Not one of those options from the management has been sold, and the way that was done I think was very, very good for this company. Any other questions on that I’m more than happy to take.

Q. The options were supposed to be for liquidity in the US.

A. And what’s happened is that they don’t want to sell, so that’s why none have been sold.

Q. Obviously, your job is to manage the company, not the share price, but since the share price went to $1.40 a few months ago there appears to be one big seller actually ----- the share price any way they want.

A. This is nothing but rumour. We have looked at our register. I understand that there’s sort of a chat thing, that people talk about these sorts of things on ShareScene. Now we don’t look at that because a lot of it is subjective, a lot of it is rumour, and a lot of it is basically people talking about themselves or knowing something about the company which they don’t know, because they don’t even ring us. Now this aspect about some big seller: we look at the register, we watch who’s buying, who’s selling, so that we’re aware of it. If we see a big seller we can pick the phone up and say, why are you selling, is there a problem? How much more have you got to sell? I can place that stock with someone else, but don’t hit the market on a negative basis. Morgan Stanley is a seller of stock. You need to know that Morgan Stanley is a very large organization, and they represent a number of custodians around the world, so when you see Morgan Stanley it is not one shareholder. We already know there are 25 to 30 different banks in Europe: Switzerland, Austria, Germany, who hold stock in this company through Morgan Stanley. So if the euro has gone up and some of them have taken some profit, that’s what they do, and that’s a quid pro quo. But there is not one seller.

Q. Can I just mention that with Morgan Stanley, they’ve actually bought about 600,000 shares over the last three weeks. I don’t actually see anyone complaining about that.

A. That’s a good point. I get the “Why is the share price going down?” I never get, “Well done. The share price is going up.” No one ever rings you. Something we have to be aware of as a group of shareholders and people interested in this company is that, even in the current sector, where a lot of companies have underperformed, perhaps some people have rotated out and gone into mining stocks - it’s probably a little bit late in the day for that - but some of them have done that. We’ve seen, I think, nine other biotechs whose CEOs have resigned or moved on or given the job to someone else, they’re finding it a little bit too tough at the moment. We have held up very well. We’ve outperformed the Nasdaq index. We’ve outperformed the biotech in Australia. We are regarding by Price Waterhouse in the last review as one of the best in Australia. We get great press in the US. If we’d had some selling, people taking some profit, that is natural. No one ever sells a share when it’s convenient to someone else, and you all know that. Now, we’ve held up well, and when the biotech sector comes back into favour we’ll go even further, and with our good news to come we are looking very good. So, the company’s in very good shape. People do buy and sell, and companies don’t go that way (up) all the time. The question is: what is the trend? You want to know, long-term holders, what do we look like next year, the year after, in five years, not tomorrow or next week. Hopefully, otherwise you’re a trader.

Q. I have a lot of faith in the company, but why does a director then sell five percent of her shares?

A. That particular person was the first director who’s actually sold a share in five years. She didn’t sell them; her husband did, and he used to be in investment banking and has not held a position for some considerable months. And when we queried that the response was - and I’m authorized to say this from them - that that was the liquid stock that they could sell, and that they would much rather have not sold anything, but that’s what they had to do. She’s a former McKinsey partner, used to have a very big salary, but now brings up three children, and he hasn’t worked for twelve months, so that’s the reason. They were very dismayed that they had to do that, as we are as well, but I don’t think you’ll see that again.


AION DIAGNOSTICS
Q. You mentioned AION diagnostics and the focus on the Australian market, because we seem to appreciate diagnostics a bit better than the US. Is there any focus to get AION over into the US?

A. Interestingly enough, we have Indiana already saying we’ve got Roche diagnostics (and others). You should bring AION over there. We want it here. We can take some of your expertise, bring it into the company but we’ll keep (playing?) on in Australia. One of the reasons I did this five years ago was I wanted to bring this great technology into benefit Australia as well, and we haven’t done enough of that yet. So, AION is where we get to do that. We get to have people at Flinders, universities of South Australia, New South Wales and Western Australia working on the material and creating these diagnostic products. That’s what we’re very much aiming for, while the ____ technology can be developed internationally.

Q. But the products will be sold in the US market as well?

A. Oh, these are global products. It’s just where you make them.

Q. What’s the timeline for AION?

A. It’s been seed-funded by pSivida. We would expect sort of a ---- (round?) occurring after the end of the year, and a listing probably - Anna Kluczewska is keen to get it done; she’s set a very aggressive timetable - I would say 18 months to two years. She may say earlier if you speak to her separately.

Q. Is scientific research going on now?

A. We’ve got a very cost-effective way of doing this. We have at any one time six PhDs in final-year med or first or second year internship who are working on market analysis, product analysis. We use very cheap ways of doing things. We use vets and vet practices to test things. This is for clinical data, not regulatory data. This is to see whether it works or not. We’re not talking about these six or seven people who work one or two days a week at what I think of fantastic rates, but work is definitely going on.

Q. You did say that pSivida shareholders will receive a distribution of shares in AION?

A. Yes.

Q. And will they be free?

A. Yes.

Q. -----

A. Yes, pSivida shareholders will get their AION distribution, which gives the spread to the company, and then there’ll be a prospectus as well in terms of money being raised, and we’ll probably have attached to it a priority offer for pSivida shareholders.

Q. Is the ratio, like 2 to 1?

A. It’s too early for that, I’m sorry. It’s a couple of years away.


STENTS
Q. Have you looked at stents at all? (example given)

A. Stents, as some of you will know, are devices put in the body to hold open a duct or an artery to allow flow. After that problem’s been fixed often the stent itself becomes the problem because it starts to block things. Baxter was the world leader in stents. Then someone like ----- came along, Foster Scientific now, where they have those stents also now loaded with a drug, with a polymer coating on the stent that gives the drug out, which assists the process of what they’re trying to achieve there. The next step beyond that – we’re working in that area. We haven’t announced anything formally. We’re seeing if we can go even one better than that, and that it to have a fully biodegradable stent. We have IP in that area, and we’re working with Qinetiq to see if it’s technically feasible. Because Biosilicon has tremendous tensile strength. The force required to crush Biosilicon is the same force required to crush steel, but what it needs is the torsional strength. So one thing we looked at originally was perhaps coating the Biosilicon onto existing stents. You get a different index between the two metals which we’re working on and perhaps the next stage is to combine the Biosilicon with another metal in a crystalline structure to produce that. You won’t hear about that for a little while, but we’re certainly working in that area.

(Thanks to audience for attending and for the questions; Australian roots and shareholders very important; always open to questions; there’ll be more such presentations again.)

Q. Coming back to the listing on the Nasdaq and the liquidity there. There’s not a lot of liquidity and they have to buy shares on the Australian market. Will that affect the Australian liquidity?

A. It could do if there’s a lot being drawn out, but it may be that the Australian shareholders aren’t big sellers, which will then lift the price rather than ---- liquidity.

Q. Just on the timing of the Puretech announcement, the company identified probably about twelve months ago that orthopaedics and tissue engineering would be non-core. Why are(n’t?) you employing an organization now to try and ----?

A. We were approached by companies such as Burrell, who’s probably one of the world leaders – there’s three or four of them in the US, another two in the UK – and it’s not like you get an approach from Puretech and you say okay we’ll work with you. It takes a while to ascertain how good they are, what have they done in the past, who are they bringing in, what are the testimonials, all those sorts of things. That takes time.

(applause, end)

Pess