Full Transcript
Dr James:
And we are live on Dentist who Invest, live Q&A with Edward Zuckerberg, renowned dentist that we have spoken about on the group quite a few times, and I’ve been looking forward to this one because Ed is here today to tell us more about himself, of course, but also Keystone Bio and where us dentists can be educated better. I think it’s fair to say, ed, on the relationship between certain bacteria which are prolific in our mouth and are linked systemically to other things that you might not necessarily realise Now. We all know about the flora in the mouth and the systemic links that we have, but you’re here today to tell us a little bit about how it’s causatively linked to dementia, amongst other things, and your new company that’s linked to that. Isn’t that right, ed? How are you, my friend?
Dr Ed:
Absolutely, I’m great. How are you doing today, james?
Dr James:
Really good. You’re speaking to us from California, if I’m not correct, and it’s bright in early half eight in the morning.
Dr Ed:
That is correct. You see the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, but really I’m about 45 minutes drive south of San Francisco.
Dr James:
That’s beautiful. Okay, what we’re going to go ahead and do is go ahead and let everybody who is in the waiting room in. We’re going to throw the mic out to the audience later on in the broadcast. But, ed, what it might be nice to do for those who don’t know is, if you are happy, to tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit of an intro, so to speak, before we get on the Keystone bio and the other stuff that we’re going to talk about today.
Dr Ed:
Sure happy to. I’ve been at Dennis for 44 years now. I graduated New York University College of Dentistry in 1978 and did a residency in the Veterans Administration Hospital, and within a few months after that, let’s get some feedback.
Dr James:
Let me just mute these microphones. There we go, ed. Sorry about that.
Dr Ed:
Sure. Shortly after that I went into my first private practice in Brooklyn, new York, one of the boroughs of New York City, and got married, and my wife went to medical school she’s a psychiatrist by training and we relocated to a northern suburb of New York City, a little sleepy town called Dobbs Ferry, new York, and we liked it so much, having been city people our whole lives, that we opted to buy a house from a retiring dentist who had a small practice in the house and after about four years we undertook a fairly major renovation, expanded out the both the lower and upper level of the house to a more modern and more efficient dental practice with three operatories, two business offices and a large front reception area. And for the bulk of my career I practiced in a practice in my home in Dobbs Ferry, new York, always an early tech adopter Back in 1981,. I don’t think the story about what interest rates were in 1981 is striking now because we’re backing up quite sharply lately, but for the longest time we’ve had inflation at 1, 2, 3% and back in 1981 interest rates were approaching 20% and the banks were not really willing to lend a lot of money. They were afraid rates were going to go to 25% or God knows where. It was crazy. I was able to get a mortgage with Citibank for a bargain basement rate of 17% and only then I was able to save a percent because I agreed to be part of their pilot electronic banking program back in 1981, crazy as it sounds and the only computers that it worked with at the time were an Atari 800 and a Commodore 64, and I had an Atari 800. So there I was doing electronic banking in 1981. It was a very primitive version. The modem speeds were dial up and extremely slow. You can see your computer screen advance one line at a time like something out of an old movie. And I remember how excited I was. And I had to go find my wife who was buried in her studies somewhere in a remote corner of the house and I said you’re not going to believe what just happened. I just paid three bills. I paid the phone company and the electric company and the water company electronically without writing a check. And looking a little bit skeptical at me, she said well, how long did that take? I said it took me about an hour. And she’s like you realize, I could write three checks and post them in an envelope and have them ready to go in five minutes. And I’m like you don’t get it, this is going to change the way things are done in the world. And she was like you’re right, I don’t get it, but knock yourself out. So over the years I’ve been able to look at various technologies and I’ve been fortunate because, let’s face it, a lot of dentists have a lot of toys in their closet gathering dust, things that they bought that they thought would make sense for their practice but really didn’t. I put an IBM PCXT in my office in 1985, had my first computer. It was a very poor computer, it was slow and it didn’t have much memory, but it was a pretty trusted, loyal employee, never called in sick and performed automated tests and didn’t make errors unless you programmed it wrong. In the late 80s I added the technology to take interoral pictures with an active cam interoral camera to help me In the late 80s Wow.
Dr James:
I didn’t know I did that. They even had interoral cameras in the 80s.
Dr Ed:
Those must have been pretty cotton edge, yeah, and you know it was always one of the biggest frustrations was knowing what my patients needed but not being able to convince them. And being able to show them pictures of like a large amalgam with a crackline in it would help them understand better why they needed a full coverage. Proud restoration on that too. When my wife joined the practice in the mid 90s, after leaving her career as a psychiatrist to run my dental office from the house, we turned to a focus on phobic patients. So we really put in a lot of technology geared at making the patient experience better. I mean we started using air abrasion and lasers wherever we could for early carious lesions instead of the drill. You know headphones in each room to drown out the sound. We had a full wall in between two operatories was a giant 300 gallon saltwater aquarium that could be viewed from the patients on either side. You know all geared at relaxation of the patient and dealing with patient phobias. I was like the first kid on the block to have digital x-ray in 1998 in my practice and then maybe 2005,. I was struggling with cumbersome charts. I mean, I’ve been a dentist for now 25 years and I had tons of paper charts and it was hard to find the documents in the charts that I wanted and I desired to have everything to convert it electronically, but they were really no systems in place for dentists back then. So, along with my son-in-law, I helped create one that you know we used internally. So I got rid of all my paper in 2005 and went completely digital. And then about 2008, we added CAD-CAM technology and started making our crowns in our home Same day. So I’ve always been an early adopter and even before the success of Facebook I was already working many companies, doing a lot of lectures, you know helping. You know educate my fellow colleagues and whatnot. And I guess I was a little bit more helping you know educate my fellow colleagues and whatnot. And I guess my second career really launched about 10 years ago. So, coincidentally, three of my four children had landed in the Bay Area. We were still in New York with one of our children and I got a call in 2010 from Dr Howard. Ferrand Is Dental Town big in the UK.
Dr James:
Dental Town. You know what? I haven’t come across it personally. There may be others out there.
Dr Ed:
I haven’t come across it personally, Dental Town is a very popular print journal, dental journal, called Dental Town, and also Dr Ferrand started the Dental Town chat very early 20 years ago, maybe even before Facebook, before MySpace or any of the social networks Dennis had an ability to go online and collaborate with colleagues by sharing x-rays and photos of a difficult case and say, hey, I’m having trouble with this, what would you guys do? Or I’m considering buying a CAD-CAN machine, like I was in 2008, and most of you out there have a CEREC, but a lot of folks. I’m very interested in the Henry Schein version, the E4D, and I gathered opinions from users of both products and got some useful conversation. So anything as it relates to problems we have in the office hey, how are you guys dealing with no shows and last minute cancellations? So Dr Ferrand, when Facebook became popular and opened up business pages, he wanted to become friends with every dentist in the world and Facebook kept him out at 5,000 friends and he called me up and said hey, ed, I just figured out that Mark’s dad is a dentist and you must know a thing or two about Facebook. Facebook, I want to become friends with everyone and Facebook’s telling me I can’t have any more friends. So I said, howard, you can have unlimited friends, but it sounds like you set up your Facebook page as a profile, not as a business page. So I helped him convert it and he said you need to write an article for a dental term. Does my office need a Facebook page? So this was back in 2010,. I wrote the article very well received, wrote another article a few months later on technology integration in the dental practice and then the fund gates, so to speak, opened. I started getting a lot of calls and invitations to lecture and travel and around the same time my first grandchild was born and the wife and I decided to move to California from New York and I sold my dental practice and basically shifted my focus to teaching, lecturing, consulting with private offices and advising startups. So I really get a large amount of pitches from new companies with new ideas in the oral healthcare field and they all seem to have a problem at some point. I can get them just so far, advising them with their products and whatnot, but eventually they need cash infusion and sometimes I help them steer to what we call a family and friends round where they can get their company off the ground, get a prototype which they can then take to a venture capital company and try and get some more money. And then another colleague of mine by the name of Jeremy Krill I don’t know if you’ve heard of the toothbrush. In the UK it’s called quip to you IP.
Dr James:
I hadn’t until we spoke about it the other day, but I don’t believe it’s well known in the UK.
Dr Ed:
Okay, it’s a kind of a knockoff to the Sonicare for a fraction of the cost and they have a subscription program where they’ll automatically mail you, like every quarter, new brush heads and whatnot. So it’s kind of like I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept behind giving me a new brush head or buying giving away the razor because there’s so much money to be made in the blades.
Dr James:
You know kind of thing. It’s why printers are so cheap, isn’t it? You know it’s the print cart, the cartages, yeah yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
Dr Ed:
Now I just throw my printer away and buy a new printer Anyhow. Jeremy’s about half my age, so he’s a little more of a go getter and he also advises a lot of companies startups and last year he formed a company called Revere Partners, and Revere Partners is the first venture fund in the world that only invests in early stage oral healthcare companies. So I joined on with Jeremy as a venture partner and we at Revere must have gotten over a hundred pitches in 2021. We have a fund which we raise funds from, mostly individual dentists who decide that, hey, you know, I don’t know anything about these stocks that my stockbroker is telling me to invest in, but I know about companies in the oral healthcare space and I wanna put some of my money in that. So we’ve got some dentists who are investing like 50K a year US, like 12,500 a quarter. Each quarter we put together a fund of three to four dental companies that our team of over 50 dental experts worldwide think are gonna be great investments and will invest, like you know, anywhere from three to 500,000 per company in three to four companies each quarter, and we’re starting to get some institutional money also. So we’re hoping that by next year our quarterly fund size will be more in the two to three million range and we’ll be investing 750K to a million per company, again in three to four companies every quarter. We’ve only had four investments or you know four funds already. We had two in 2021 and then a Q1 and Q2 this year, and already one of our companies was acquired for a 40% bump only three months after we invested in the company. So we’re already seeing great success. We’ve got experts in everything from chemistry to the regulatory space helping you know companies that have to get regulatory approval to get their products marketed. We have biochemists. We have obviously, lots of dentists. We have specialists in every phase of dentistry, pathologists. You know analytics financial analytics experts are part of the team so we can look at companies and really brainstorm and bring you know company, help them come along to market and also pick and choose great companies to invest in. The other thing I want to talk about and I know which is probably the primary reason why you brought me on today is about a little over a year ago I got to meet Dan Cindillar and the team at Keystone Bio and the work they’re doing with the eradication of the bacteria PgN-duralis from periodontal disease is just mind blowing.
Dr James:
We talked about this prior to you coming on and I had no idea that this link existed between P Ginger Valis.
Dr Ed:
and well, I’ll not spoil the, I’ll not take the window out of your sales, but you’re it’s, it’s a you know I a year ago I was probably like most emphasis in that I’d heard of P Ginger Valis but I really couldn’t tell you that much about it and I knew it was a not a desirable bug to have in your mouth. I knew it was in my mouth because I had, and one of the lectures I gave about five years ago somebody at one of the booths pulled me over and said Dr Zuckerberg, spit in this tube and I’m going to give you a complete bacterial analysis of all the microbiome you know in your oral flora. And on that list you know was a bunch of bad stuff, including P Ginger Valis. And you know at the time I kind of tucked it away for information and just used it as a reminder to make sure I get my scaling and root planning done every three months because I’ve got some, you know, four and five millimeter pockets. I had some occasional ginger old bleeding on flossing and whatnot and you know I definitely fell into the category of people with some early periodontal disease. Like most of the population I mean talking about people over age 30 50 percent have some form of periodontal disease. When it gets into my age group, the over 65 age group, the numbers as high as 83 percent, and almost half or more of those have a P Ginger Valis based primary based gingerball infection. And so you know, the first thing I did was, hey, this is like crazy stuff. But I ran a poll on my own Facebook page among my friends, but I asked all my dental and medical colleagues to exclude themselves from the poll because I wanted to really get a lay public perception of this, and I said simple one word yes or no answer. Have you ever heard of P Ginger Valis? This is among the general public, and I got 75 responses, of which 74 said no, and the one who said yes admitted they hadn’t really heard of it but they figured out from the latin derivation of the name that it sounded like a gum infection bacteria. So really no one in the lay public has ever heard of P Ginger Valis, and they should. They should because P Ginger Valis has been directly correlated with not only Alzheimer’s disease but all forms of heart disease you know my blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks um cardiometabolic diseases like diabetes, um the? Um. The bacteria causes an impairment of the glycogen synthesis process that goes on in the liver, so the body is not able to reduce sugar levels adequately, and even with insulin dosing, the body responds. In individuals with P, ginger, valis, gum infections is not what we would expect, so it’s very hard to titrate the appropriate amount of insulin to give a diabetic. Treatment for diabetics is enhanced and simplified when they’re um put on a periodontal program and restored to periodontal health. Digestive cancers like oral cancer, esophageal cancer, colon cancer, rectal cancer? Um have been shown direct links to the bacteriopigian derails, rheumatoid arthritis, various other types of liver disease the list is mind boggling how long it is um we’re now research articles going on now that erectile dysfunction has a component which may be have its triggers in um periodontal disease, with uh, p Ginger Valis infections and mental depression, from something my wife, who’s a psychiatrist, is working with a couple of companies on now also exploring that connection. So how does it do it? Um? You know, we’ve been studying over the years the brains of people who died, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and in 100%, 100%, every single autopsy brain of people who died from Alzheimer’s show the toxic effects of the bacteriopigian derails. That’s a staggering connection. And yet researchers cannot isolate the bacteria itself from the brain. And this actually makes incredibly common sense if you think about it. Using our knowledge base, we understand that P Ginger Valis is an anaerobic organism. It thrives in areas with very low oxygen tension, like the sub-gingival pockets of patients with gum disease. It’s a perfect place for it to live. Also, in its basic form it’s not as virulent as it gets later on, after it lives in the um in the sub-gingival tissues becomes an integral part of the periodontal biofilm that can contain many bacteria, including uh, prevetella and and um. You know a lot of. You know a lot of other bugs that aren’t as bad as P Ginger Valis, but what happens is when they live communally, they share DNA and P Ginger Valis has the ability to incorporate the DNA from these other bacteria and turn it into its wildly virulent form. The other thing to understand, you know, is that the brain has the highest oxygen tension of the entire body. I mean, one of the reasons why sleep apnea is such a dangerous problem is because, um, during sleep, our oxygen tension in the brain is shown to drop from the normal healthy 96, 97% oxygen tension throughout the bloodstream down to, in some individuals in the 70s. That’s severe oxygen deprivation and the brain is most affected by oxygen deprivation. So, definitely linked between sleep apnea and dementia. But so for that reason alone, because of the high oxygen levels in the brain that we need to keep our brains healthy and functional, pigeon gavallus would not thrive in the brain, so the brain is not an obvious target for the bacteria itself. The other reason why the brain is not a target for pigeon gavallus is that we’ve evolved, and many other mammals too, with an anatomical structure called the blood brain barrier. The blood brain barrier is the reason why our brain and nervous system, for the most part, stays relatively sterile and infection free. One of the known bacterias which can cross the blood brain barrier would be meningococcus, which is why meningitis can spread rapidly and kill within a couple of days, sometimes with fever spikes. You know that are just crazy. So the scientists have been doing research, studying pigeon gavallus for over 70 years and there have been over 10,000 articles, you know, describing all these correlations. Hey, we know that people with gum disease have greater incidence of heart attacks, they have greater incidence of digestive cancers, they have greater incidences of all these other issues, but we don’t really know how until recently, until the research from PG, you know, showed how this actually works and the way it works, I don’t know. Do I have the ability to share screen?
Dr James:
I can send that across to you just now. My friend, let me do that for you. Yeah, that’s all you say, go.
Dr Ed:
Let me bring up a slide on my end Absolutely.
Dr James:
Okay, let’s go ahead and let some people in the waiting room. There we are.
Dr Ed:
Okay, see that slide here, let me see if I can make it bigger. Here we go. So what you’re seeing here is a PG organism and the arrows show these small circular objects that are called outer membrane vesicles or OMVs. Those OMVs contain toxic proteins that are released by the bacteria of pigeon gavallus. Now that those toxic proteins in gum infection get released through the bloodstream to different parts of the body, so the bacteria itself lives only in the periodontal pocket. But the toxic proteins that are carried away in these outer membrane vesicles invade other organisms, other organs in the body. So, for example, they get carried through the vascular tissues and they cause increased permeability in the lining of the vascular tissues, which promotes calcifications in the arteries, leading to hypertension and strokes and heart disease. They’ve been shown that these outer membrane vesicles and these toxic proteins can increase the permeability of the blood brain barrier. So it’s the toxic proteins themselves that penetrate the blood brain barrier into the brain and destroy the neuronal transmissions and the synaptic conductions that go on in the brain, causing the brain to malfunction and leading to Alzheimer’s disease. The toxic proteins are the ones that go to the liver and affect the body’s glycogen synthesis abilities. The toxic proteins are the ones that invade our digestive system, irritating the linings, causing tissue response, that cause dysplasia and ultimately forms of digestive cancer and colon cancer and esophageal cancer and oral cancer. So it’s through these toxic proteins that the bacteria, that the bacteria of P genderalis, does its work, or its dirty work, and that’s how we’ve uncovered the process. So now that we’ve done this and figured out the process, now the problem is had we clear the body of the infection, that’s primarily of P genderalis? And so even among the profession there’s still disagreement. Yet back in 2008, there was a study by two researchers at the University of Washington, haji Shengalis and Rich Darvoh. I actually know Rich Darvoh personally. I’ve spoken to him for hours on length about P genderalis. It’s just an incredibly fascinating organism that’s learned that evolved methods to avoid detection by the body’s immune system. Probably the two most dangerous bacteria that have evolved in such a manner are P genderalis and H pylori, which lives in the digestive tract. Very stubborn and possible. They’re impervious to any antibiotics. And yet the discovery and this will make you guys proud, the discovery for the formulation that Keystone Bio is working with now was actually fallen upon in the UK in 1995. And if anyone’s interested, I could provide more information about that research. So it was a very small trial, very small phase one trial, funded by I forgot which university, and the subject group size was 20 people. So they put 10 people in the control group where they did scaling and root planning and then injected some saline rinse into the sub-digital tissues after scaling and root planning. And the other 10, they did scaling and root planning and injected this monoclonal antibody. It was a. It was a murine formulation, so it was built from rodent antibodies. This monoclonal antibody injected into the pocket after scaling and root planning and the other 10 individuals. And the individuals were monitored for about a year and a half. The control group that got saline had return of pijon de vallis within the first month of post treatment. In the 10 individuals that got the monoclonal antibody the earliest return of PG detectable return of PG was nine months. Yet the researchers at the time were proposing a permanent cure by this one administration of this model Colonial antibody. They determined that whoever was funding the research said, hey, this is not what we’d hoped. Also, back in 1995, 27 years ago, we didn’t have the understanding. We knew PG analysis is an evil bacteria but we didn’t quite have the understanding that there was a direct correlation with all these diseases. No one picked it up again until Dan Cindillar found the literature. Dan, by the way, was one of the co-founders of an organization called AOSH, a-a-o-s-h, which is the American Academy of Oral and Systemic Health, promoting the connection between the mouth and the body. Dan assembled an incredible team including world-renowned vaccinologists and virologists. One of the heads of the cardiology department at the Cleveland Clinic Cleveland Clinic is world-renowned for their cardiac department. Quite an impressive team of scientists that worked with this murine version to develop a human chimeric version of the monoclonal antibody, found the binding sites where it binds to Pugin de Valles and effectively shuts down. We have all the intellectual property on the work that the team has done. The biologic is now in trials in Australia, phase one. We are really optimistic, based on the very small sample population but based on the individuals in the UK back in 1995 that showed efficacy and safety. None of the individuals had any side effects. That the safety and efficacy phase one trial will go very well At that point. Sometime next year we break off into phase two where we target individual populations Populations with early Alzheimer’s disease, populations with early detectable cardiac disease, early detectable diabetes, early detectable esophageal cancer or whatnot. Then over the course of a couple of years those individuals will be monitored, with the individuals having treatment of their gum disease with the monoclonal antibody versus the control group who will get something else. Then and only then will the biologic be approved for certain conditions. But next year, as soon as early spring next year, after a successful phase one showing effective removal and safety of the drug, that’s going to create a ton of excitement among the pharmaceutical industry and big pharma players that there’s going to be folks reaching out making Keystone Bio an acquisition target. Now, whether the company decides to have an early acquisition as an exit strategy at maybe a 10X multiple is one thing I know in talking to the CEO. He’s in it for the long haul. He wants this to be his legacy. He wants to be part of seeing this vision through all the way to the end, where dentists or the hygienists, as part of the scaling and root-plating therapy, are routinely administering the gel into the pocket. It’ll have to be. If, as we expect, it eradicates pigennivalis for about nine months, it’s going to have to probably be repeated at six-month intervals, a cost on top of whatever the dentist are charging now for the period on maintenance visit of probably about an additional $500 US for the drug administration, tripling or quadrupling the dentist fee for the procedure. Not only that, but increasing tenfold the demand for the late public to be seen by dentistry to care for their oral health. My role, obviously. I’m 40 years removed from microbiology in dental school. I can’t help the team with their research or anything like that, but I recognize that if we’re going to have this drug in market ready status in three years, we need to change those poll results. When we ask a late person, have you ever heard of pigennivalis? We need 74 out of 75 yeses. We need to make pigennivalis a household word, an evil household full letter word like cancer, alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, things that no one wants. I’ve got PG, no, help me. Then dentists now are going to get benefit now, even before the drug is ready, because people are going to say, hey, I’ve got PG or do I have PG? The dentist can provide that answer via a salivary test. Then, once it’s shown to them that they have it and over 50 percent of adults walking around have a PG-based infection in their mouth Half, that’s a huge number Once it’s been shown and once patients are aware that they’ve got PG and that it’s a bad mother, they’re going to want the dentist to help them get rid of it. What can you do now, doc? I know you told me there’s a drug coming in three years. What can you do for me now? Scaling and root planing will only if it’s really done efficiently. You know removing everything, and let me tell you, my hygienist removes everything. She scales down to my toes. I’ve got deep, I’ve got a very high pain tolerance. So I just tell her go get it, man. I mean, my mother passed away 18 years ago of Alzheimer’s disease and when I did my salivary analysis last year, my PG on a scale of zero to 10 was 9.7. So I’m a high risk for all those bad things. I actually that test, by the way, was done right before I went for cleaning, so it had been about three months before my hygiene visit. I got the idea, after my last prophylaxis on April 1st, to do a repeat five days later. So five days later I did the salivary test and I just got the results back about 10 days ago and my PG score was only 3.7 out of 10, down from 9.7. But that was five days after. The studies show that within three weeks, pg populations are back to normal. So what do I do? Do I go see my hygienist every three weeks for deep scaling and root planning? That’s not real practical. And even though I’m reducing the bacterial load of PG for a three week period after scaling and root planning, I’m not eliminating it, and the half life of the toxic proteins that are circulating in my bloodstream that have been released by PG, are still doing that dirty work for over a month. So by the time PG returns in my mouth three weeks later, there’s really been no. Even though there’s been a reduction in the load of PG, there’s been no appreciable reduction in the toxic protein circulating in my bloodstream. So while it may help a little, the actual therapies available to us now, be they rinsing with whatever closest listerine, you name it, whatever you want to, chlorhexidine, whatever you want to rinse with scaling and root planning every few months, we cannot eliminate the toxic proteins of PG. We’ve got to get this drug to market and keep our fingers crossed and pray that it passes the trials that it needs to and that we as dentists, by administering this monoclonal antibody as part of our routine therapy, can have the single greatest impact in reducing the health, in improving the health by reducing the incidence of these major maladies of disease. So to get through these trials you know it’s expensive. Pg Keystone Bio was undertaking a $50 million funding range and there’s been tremendous institutional demand to get in on this investment. And I went to the company shortly after they named me as their Chief Dental Officer last year and said to them look, I need tools to help educate dentists about the process of how PG causes destruction and end organ disease and I also need an army of dentists to educate their patients and to speak to the lay population. I can’t do it all myself and to get people on board I could think of no better way than to make a small investment in Keystone Bio available to interested dentists who want to embrace this, who want to educate their patients and, at the same time, have some skin in the game to be a part of hopefully tremendous financial success that KB will see in the future, and pass that on. So I was able to negotiate a $2 million carve out. So we’re in the process of developing a vehicle to allow investment in 25K minimum increments by individual dental investors. They recently had a strategy change. They’re so anticipating a successful and efficacious phase one that they decided that raising $50 million that they need to get through all their trials in the next three years at this point in time doesn’t make financial sense. They give away too much of the company. They’re lowering the funding round 17 million ask planning that after a successful phase one they’re expecting a significant bump up in the company valuation. Right now the company valuation and the current round is probably going to be somewhere in the bull park of about $100 million. After a successful phase one that number could easily go to $1 billion a 10X in a year, and so they’ll approach an additional funding round, probably in about a year, for the remaining 30 million or so that they would need to raise to get through the additional trials. But they’ll be able to do that funding round at a much less cost to the company if the valuation is significantly higher. So now is an exciting time to get in at a relatively inexpensive valuation for people who understand this, understand the potential and see something that can really revolutionize the practice of dentistry and really elevate dentists. I don’t know how it is in the UK, but in the US dentists are second citizens when it comes to doctors. I mean my wife and her family. When she was growing up, be all and end all was to be a physician, a medical doctor, and when she told them that she was dating a dentist, they said you can’t date a real doctor. So I think something like this could change all dentists. If we can show that through a dental based treatment we can reduce the incidence of Alzheimer’s, reduce the incidence and progression of heart disease and all these abnormalities, dennis could all of a sudden become the most important health care provider in the lives of any patient.
Dr James:
It’s an interesting one, you know. I’ve never encountered that myself. I’d be interested here if other dentists feel that way, that they’re not favorably compared to doctors certainly within the UK Not something I’ve ever come across. But yeah, you’re right, you know what I mean. If there’s anything that we can do in the whole world to help our patients, the first thing we have to start with is raise an awareness, which is what we’re talking about here today, and then also, as well as that, with Keystone Bio. I love that style of investing that you spoke about just a minute ago, because it basically turns it into a social enterprise, because you have lots of people who will preach about it, because it’s constantly relevant to them, because they’re aware that they have equity in this company, and then, as well as that, what that means is that there’s a mutual benefit from them for the patient as well First and foremost the patient, but then also the dentist, because they’re propagating and spreading this message, which helps the company raise awareness about itself and what it does. So it’s a yeah, I love that style of investing. I love that style of investing.
Dr Ed:
I mean, if the company is successful, dentists will profit even without investing. They’ll have a new therapy for which they can. You know, I don’t know dentists now for a periodontal maintenance visit in the US the charging may be $150 to $200. Being able to tack on an additional $500 cost to that visit will be a windfall for dentists in their practice income. But having a play I mean having a potential 10 to 50 X return on investment that they put $25,000 into that can grow to $1 million or more is a chance to, you know, have a double windfall Totally. You know, and so you know. The other thing is the education component is really critical, because adding $500 to the cost of dental care is no small figure and a lot of patients are going to balk at that. So behind the scenes, keystone Bio obviously is going to be presenting their data to medical insurance carriers. When someone gets sick with Alzheimer’s disease or heart disease or cancer, medical insurance carriers are the ones who are brunting the most financial burden of those costs. And so if we can show medical insurance carriers that we can save them a ton of money by reducing the number of patients who are going to get these diseases, then the hope is that medical insurance companies will then routinely cover this treatment, even though it’s performed in dental orbits.
Dr James:
Cool. 100%, absolutely. If people are interested in investing in Keystone Bio or learning more about it, can they reach out to you? Yet Is that something that they can do?
Dr Ed:
Absolutely so. I mean, I’ve got a number of ways that people can reach out to me. They can reach out to me on my Facebook page, painless Social Media. They can also email me if they’d like to, and simply at drz for DrZ, at painlessdrzcom, and I can actually type that into the chat field.
Dr James:
Absolutely DrZ. I love it. That’s cool, Great, Awesome to learn about Keystone Bio and awesome to learn about P J J Valles and its effect on the brain, because that was something that I had never come across and definitely there’ll be a lot of dentists out there who are now enlightened on that one.