Tiresias: The Rising Buzz

“When you hear a buzz around a beehive, you know they're making honey in there.”

Terrence Howard

My friends,

Tiresias has always been fascinated as to how suddenly one starts to hear about something you hadn't heard about for months. This has been such a week for Tiresias. Apart from several stories in the background share market sites , most importantly, Tiresias noted three important announcements which might have gone under his friends’ radars. Tiresias is a long-term subscriber to and follower of Zeiss. Zeiss, that Teutonic plodding giant was almost excited this week. They published a case of a patient in Munich, Germany, who presented with acute neurological symptoms due to a glioblastoma multiforme, the most malignant of brain tumours, located in a particularly eloquent area of the brain. This patient was treated at the Technical University Hospital of Munich in Germany. The patient was treated using Optiscan CONVIVO confocal laser endomicroscope with Zeiss KINEVO platform and with local brachy-radiotherapy. “The CONVIVO delivered rapid cellular images with virtually unlimited number of situses without disrupting tissue during the surgery” and allowed visualisation of the eloquent areas of the brain which did not have to be touched or biopsied to see malignant tumour cells, in real-time. And remember my friends, CONVIVO is already superseded by the development of InVue. This is the future of all brain tumour management. Anything else, from now, regardless of what some might claim otherwise, is obsolete and unacceptable. It is only a matter of time before this is out in the wider world. Tiresias’s friends know well that there has been no improvement in prognosis for this malignant brain tumour in the last 60 years. This lack of improvement has been in spite of major advances in surgical and medical techniques and especially despite the introduction of Macro-imaging with CT scanning, MRI and PET scanning. It is only a matter of time before this standard of care for malignant brain tumour is instituted and every neurosurgical theatre in the world has Optiscan CONVIVO installed.

But just a little aside to the preceding, Tiresias noted that the imaging was with fluorescein. This is of course an agent that has been used worldwide for many medical procedures, most often in ophthalmic surgery, for many decades. It is still and can still be used world-wide, including in America. Tiresias’s friends would have noted that, the FDA just recently changed the classification of fluorescein from a contrast agent to a drug, a meaningless and pointless bureaucratic manoeuvre which has resulted in the hold up of Optiscan’s FDA approval of the oral endomicroscope. This little mindless ploy does not, of course does not, apply anywhere else in the world, and as we can see fluorescein is being used without any problems whatsoever, in brain tumour surgery in Europe, as it can be in the rest of the world. This little FDA hump will soon be overpassed.

The second event that caught Tiresias’s eye was in a local Stocks and Shares newsletter “EYE Between Bulls&Bears”. This very informed newsletter, this week, listed the “3 Best ASX Healthcare Stocks for Long Term Growth. It is no surprise that Optiscan Imaging Limited was number one, “numero uno”. Tiresias noted that the other two stocks, although undoubtedly have an excellent future growth potential, have gone through their explosive exponential growth phase already. Optiscan however, is yet to see the exponential growth, and represents more than just a “growth stock”, but an “explosive growth stock”, a 10X stock, for starters.

The third item that came to Tiresias notice this week was that Professor Farah, Optiscan CEO & MD, just spent two weeks at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester Minnesota, working with the Optiscan and Mayo Clinic teams “combining Optiscan’s state of the art technology with Mayo Clinic’s unparalleled clinical expertise”. Also noted in the announcement that “the goal is to develop state of the art surgical robots that will revolutionise surgical procedures.” This may not have received much notice, but it was part of the buzz that piqued Tiresias’s attention and adds to the fizz.

Until next week