ProPhase Labs, Inc.

Hello and good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's presentation. My name is Noella Alexander-Young, Virtual Event Moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we want to thank everyone for joining us today for ProPhase Labs' fourth quarter and year-end 2024 results. ProPhase is trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PRPH. Presenting today is Ted Karkas, Chairman and CEO. Following the presentation is a Q&A session for which you can participate using the chat box in the top right-hand corner of your screen. With that being said, I will now hand the floor over to Ted.

thank you so much noella and thank you to everyone that's joining the call today i am ted karkas ceo of prophase labs i'm actually excited for this call i got i have a lot to cover um i think that there are some misconceptions out there and hopefully i can clarify some of them so for beginners the forward-looking statement uh normally i just say i'll assume you read it but for the year end and uh reporting i think i should actually read a forward-looking statement except for the historical information contained here and this document contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the private securities litigation reform act of 1995 including statements regarding our strategy plans objectives and initiatives including our expectations regarding the future revenue growth potential of each of our subsidiaries our expected timeline for commercializing our be smart esophageal cancer test our expectations regarding future liquidity events the success of our efforts to collect accounts receivables and anticipated timeline for any payments relating thereto and our ability to successfully transition into a consumer product company management believes that these forward-looking statements are reasonable as and when made, including today. However, such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to our ability to obtain and maintain necessarily regulatory approvals. general economic conditions, consumer demand for our products and services, challenges relating to entering into and growing new business lines, the competitive environment, and the risk factors listed from time to time in our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and any other SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by applicable securities laws. Readers are questioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are questioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. I'm sorry that was a mouthful, but it's obviously important that I read that. Let's get to the matters at hand. Interestingly, given the... what has transpired over the last six months, I think we have two sets of shareholders on this call and two sets of shareholders in our company. We have the shareholders that have been with me for literally 10, 20, 30 years. There are people that I've known that I've worked with. And by way of quick background, I've been an investor in small cap development stage companies for 40 years. So there are people that were investing with me literally 30, 40 years ago that became big investors in ProPhase Labs when I did long before I became CEO. I only became CEO as an activist shareholder. So in any event, on the other hand, given what's transpired over the last six to nine months, we have a new wave of investors who have become very large investors given the low price of the stock so there's two different groups here we have the group from the past and and and i'll get into that a little bit in fact maybe i should go to the timeline a little bit so just to be clear our stock when i turned around the company was 65 cents The company was virtually bankrupt. It had one business, Coldy's, Cold Remedy, with declining sales, looked like it was going out of business. I had to learn how to be a CEO, turn around the Coldy's brand, ultimately sold it for $50 million. Paid out $2.40 in cash, special dividends, and bought back a bunch of stock. Did two Dutch auctions, buying back stock. It's like a deja vu right now. We're back to being a penny stock. The difference between when I turned around the company last time and this time is that the assets... underlying our company i feel like we have three or four assets each one of which has the potential to be worth dramatically more than coldies was ever worth and yet i turned around the company i was able to pay out 2.40 in special dividends i hope the long term shareholders appreciate that i did that that would be my goal and expectation to have those kinds of activities again and literally i'm not talking about three to five years potentially within the next year that do the same kind of activities um and i have to be careful what i say from an sec point of view i don't know if i you know can say some of the things all i can say is look at what i've done in the past and you can assume if we have the liquidity events that i believe are coming you can assume that i will do the same kinds of things in the future all right so um with that said i could go more into the timeline i think i'd rather more get into the businesses i'll just i will just tell you quickly so we're all on the same page after we sold the coldies brand we got into cova testing so I had to learn how to be a CEO, had to learn the coldies business while turning around the brand, learning the consumer products industry. I did all that. Then we got into COVID testing, did the same thing, learned a new business I'd never been in. And we built it up and did hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues. Outperformed probably 95% of the labs in the country. I have a history of execution for 40 years. The only time it looks like I haven't executed is the past year. And there are very specific reasons for that. I will get into that. But by the same token, I feel like I'm at a point in time where myself and our management team, our management team has evolved. Our company has evolved. And I believe we're going to do it again right now, going forward from where we are today. OK, so we got into the COVID testing business. The business blew up big, made a lot of money, generated a lot of revenue, generated a lot of accounts receivable. We then, with that business doing so well, we made a few acquisitions, which we thought at the time were very smart acquisitions. One was Nebula Genomics. One was acquiring our esophageal cancer test, and I'm going to talk about both of those. And we also acquired Equivir. I have to be careful how I talk about it as we get closer to commercializing it. But let's just say it's an immune support product that works really well, particularly in the cold flu COVID season. All right. um and so I have all these things that I'm going to be talking about today um and what and let's see I'll just mention one more thing uh we built out formulas I know that there was some disappointed over what we sold it for but we did sell it for 23 million dollars if you go back a couple of years earlier it might have only been worth five million dollars or eight million dollars did we sell it for less than what I expected we were going to sell it for if you would ask me a year ago absolutely We built out the customer base. We added customers. We increased prices. I'm being honest with you. Our management team at FarmLabs didn't execute from a profitability standpoint. So we sold it for less than our expectations. However, we did build out that business and we did sell it for $23 million. Now, if we've taken all that in cash, our stock price would be a lot higher. But with that cash, what happened was we retired most of the debt of the company. So we really cleaned up the balance sheet of the company, didn't leave us with a lot of cash. Of course, we did the Think Equity raise at a discount, which hurt our stock price, and it's left us tight on capital ever since. All right. That's a little bit about the past. Let's talk about where we are now and going forward. So again, to be honest with you, at the end of the day, we still sold Farmlabs. We sold Coldies for $50 million. We sold Farmlabs, the manufacturing facility, for $23 million. And to be clear, when I sold the coldies brand if the buyer had said we'll only pay you 50 million dollars for coldies if you include the manufacturing facility I would have included it so it gives you an idea for us to now several years later to sell it for 23 million dollars it's still a nice win for the company all right um before I get into the specific subsidiaries I wanted to talk about several potential liquidity events, which would be game-changing for our company and presumably game-changing for our stock price. First and foremost, from our COVID testing days, we built up an enormous amount of accounts receivable. The way this all developed, it all started with the fact that we were one of the leading laboratories testing for residents of the city of New York. So just imagine, I don't know how many people, what the population is these days. I don't remember, eight, nine million people. But the bottom line is if you walk down the streets of New York City during the height of COVID, there were tents popped up all over the place. A significant percentage of those tents were sending their specimens to our lab. We started off doing 100, 200, 500 COVID tests per week, specimens coming into our lab. We got to 1,000 a week. Then it built up to a thousand a day. Imagine how many people we had to hire in order to handle one thousand specimens coming into our lab every day. So imagine the first time you go to a doctor's office. You know, for the first time at a new doctor. You're supposed to get there 15 to 30 minutes early, fill out a bunch of paperwork. They're taking a photo of your driver's license, a photo of your insurance. They're looking up your insurance to see if your insurance is accurate. They're doing all these things. Takes 15, 30 minutes. There's a physician's assistant or somebody at the front desk that's doing all of that in advance before you ever even see the doctor. So now imagine, instead, you're on the streets of New York, you're walking up to a tent to get tested, and there's a line of 10 or 15 people. Guess what? The people that were collecting your specimen, they were doing a quick swab, packaging it up, sending it out here. They were collecting the patient information very quickly. They didn't have 15 to 30 minutes. So what was happening is they're collecting all these specimens, they're getting a minimal amount of patient information, sending it to our lab, and at the same time, We had to turn around the results in 24 to 48 hours. So we had 1,000 specimens they were doing. We hired a couple hundred people. Now just imagine it's the height of Omicron. We had 10,000 specimens coming into our lab per day for a period of time. It was impossible to collect the information and process it, but we had the former government administration guaranteeing that they would reimburse us so we did all the specimens with the understanding we would collect the information and get organized after the fact but we were actually doing a service to the public we're turning around the specimens we're providing the results we were one of the best performing labs in the entire country but we built up a big accounts receivable so now fast forward to where we are today we have on our books uh right now approximately 20 million dollars in accounts receivable we have uh we hired crown medical collections and they've gone through all of our testing and if you go back over the several years there's about 150 million dollars worth of testing that we never collected on now part of that is what we build the insurance companies and um what was the appropriate amount or what they had to pay versus what we built. But at the end of the day, Crown Medical went through all of our testing, highly sophisticated software that they have. This is all they do. They have like a couple of dozen attorneys. This is all they are doing is collecting COVID testing. And they took our test and they said, okay, based on this data with the insurance companies, we believe and are confident we're going to collect about $73 million. They take their contingency fees, their percentage. They believe they're going to net us $50 million. Compare that to our market cap. There's a dramatic difference between the two. And the interesting thing is the $50 million, what a coincidence, we sold Coldies for $50 million. And that was the beginning of our stock going from $0.65. At one point, it's $16 a share. I'm not saying it's going there again, but there are some interesting similarities. So we anticipate, I can't guarantee how much we're going to collect. But I feel comfortable that it's going to be the more than roughly 20 million that's on our books and records. I actually talked to the auditors about it. They said it's not appropriate to increase that number. That's where we are as of today. So interestingly, if we collect more than $20 million, there'll be some nice quarterly gains in the coming quarters. So the goal or procedure prospect for that is The lab subsidiaries, only the lab subsidiaries doing the COVID testing. Our goal is to bankrupt those subsidiaries and then go into bankruptcy court where Crown Medical then can serve litigation on roughly 1,100 insurance companies, incredibly efficiency, all through one court with one judge. That's the goal. You do it in bankruptcy through bankruptcy court. Otherwise, you'd have to file litigation, you know, eleven hundred times, eleven hundred different courts. And, you know, that would be a nightmare. So they are incredibly efficient and successful at doing this over and over and over again. I am so excited. There was a lab one tenth our size that collected ten million dollars. Literally, they were like one-tenth of our size. That's how I first heard about them. We hired them right away. We've been working for them for the last several months. We're almost ready to go through the actual bankruptcy of the subsidiaries. This has nothing to do with ProPhase Labs, the company. We're just bankrupting dormant covid testing lab subsidiaries okay nothing to be worried about and um i'm looking forward to in the next couple of weeks filing um crown medical believes there may be some low-hanging fruit meaning there may be some insurance companies that if they contact them before we even start this process they may want to settle and at a time we may get a surprise and get some money in actually before we actually file for litigation once we file I have been told that some insurance companies want to settle very, very quickly. They don't want to bring in lawyers. They don't want to take on the expense. If they owe three, four, $500,000, they don't want to spend $100,000 or $200,000 litigating, especially when they know that they owe the money. So anyway, that's a little bit about Crown Medical. Another potential liquidity event, and I'm going to get into our subsidiaries, is the potential sale of Nebula Genomics and DNA Complete. We are exploring that. As I said in the press release, we're in the early stages. But just because we're in the early stages, if we decide to sell it to something, we could sell very quickly. We paid $14 million for it approximately. Don't quote me on the exact number. We put a lot of money into it. We've now completely overhauled the business. I'm going to get into that a little bit. I just want to first focus on these liquidity events. But it's another liquidity event that could be significant for the company. It will take all the pressure off of the stock. It will give us the working capital we need, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And finally, I am working on a multimillion dollar loan. The goal would be for it to be non-dilutive. It is in the works right now. I can't guarantee how it's going to come out. But the idea, all these things, Even if I just do a multi-million dollar loan, that should bridge us to some of these other potential liquidity events. And then finally, on top of all that, and this is one of the things we highlighted in the press release, we're a different company today. than we were in 2024 that's why i'm not even going to focus on the financials of 2024 that's honestly a complete waste of time we are a different completely different company we sold pmi formalized manufacturing for 23 million dollars in january so what does that have and formula has actually lost money last year so we take away all that overhead all those losses and we clean up the balance sheet and all the expense related to the payables and the interest on the debt associated uh with the debt that went away when we sold pmi so all that our our balance sheet today is very different than it was then so that that's that that's you know obviously we're a different company the second thing we did was We shut down our Nebula Genomics Laboratory. And again, when I talk about Nebula in a few minutes, I'll talk a little bit more about that. Enormous overhead associated with the lab. Major mistake that we ever built it. Now, when we built it, we built it with the idea that we had all this COVID testing, revenues coming in, but the revenues slowed down. Ultimately, we ended up with a big accounts receivable and we ended up with enormous overhead, leased equipment, and at the same time, a B2B business that my former management, led me to believe was going to be a big business, which it wasn't. We could not support the lab with a B2B business. It just did not make sense. So finally, we shut it down. It was enormous amount of overhead that's gone. The overhead with formulas is gone. A lot of the debt is gone. And in addition to all that, we completely streamlined operations and cut headcount dramatically. And I said that you can look at the press release. I don't have it in front of me what the exact numbers are. My point being, when I first took over control of this company, the first thing I did, I took our headcount from 27 people down to, within six months, I took it down to about four or five people. And then I added a few more. We ran the company more efficiently, more successfully with seven, eight, nine people than we had 27. That's just in our headquarters. Had nothing to do with our manufacturing facility or elsewhere. I basically have done the same thing. And I did that in conjunction with Jason Karkas and Stu Hollinshead, who think the same way that I do. And now that the three of us are running the company together, we completely cut out an enormous amount of our rent so we're a different company even now than we were in the first quarter again because we sold formalized in january i think we shut down the laboratory approximately in january february we cut head count in february march and so the second quarter is going to be dramatically different from the first quarter in terms of um our overhead employee count the efficiency of our company i do not ever want to run the company any differently than the way we have now gotten it to a point of being significantly more efficient. My focus and our management's focus now is on building revenues and working towards profitability. Okay, so with that, ProPhase Biopharma, led by our esophageal cancer test. This is an incredibly exciting test. Now, interestingly, I wouldn't normally start with this, but somebody asked me, they're concerned They read the press release and asked me. I said, I'll address it on the call. They're concerned that we're now going to spend a lot of money to commercialize this test. It couldn't be further from what I plan to do, as I just outlined. And to be clear, we have this great early stage therapeutic called linebacker. I don't even talk about it. The reason I talk about it is it's a It received phenomenal preclinical results. I'm not spending millions of dollars to develop it. I just won't. So I haven't even been talking about it in the presentation. If we can partner it, great. If we can't partner it, I'm probably not going to develop it, but I'm certainly not going to spend millions of dollars to develop it. The same thing with our esophageal cancer test. I am not going to spend... significant amounts of money that would hurt the company and dilute the company. Our stock, in my personal opinion, is at a ridiculously low price. The last thing I'm going to do is take on new overhead on a new initiative. We have so many great assets in the company. We have so much potential liquidity coming into the company. Why do I want to destroy all that to spend an enormous amount of money to commercialize anything? I won't do it. We have some great businesses to develop here and we can do them methodically the same way I did with the coldies business where I might have lost a million dollars a year on coldies, but that's when I was building the brand and then sold it for $50 million. So could I do that with Nebula Genomics? Could I do that with their dietary supplements? I don't even know that I'll have to. i actually believe that some of those business nebula genomics we may have gotten to a point where actually break even to profitable now going forward we can actually grow that business now last thing i'm going to do is blow up our company um after our stock price is so low so i do want to get into this though because i think that this is really exciting but i promise you the goal here is to develop this to take it a few steps there are some very large diagnostic cancer companies who are interested in this that we will work with. Ultimately, the goal is to partner this for a lot of money. But you have to go through the steps to prove it to them. So, for example, we have competitors. We have a we believe we have a better test than what they have. but they may have already had some success in commercialization. They may already have the distribution. So this is smaller companies. There are smaller companies, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, and then larger companies in the many billions of dollars, eight, $10 billion. There's the whole range. I can't tell you who we're going to partner with, who we're going to do a deal with. But what I can tell you is there is no test like our Be Smart Esophageal Cancer Test in the world. And I'm going to get into that a little bit right now. All right. So first of all, just very quickly, and I know I'm going to run over time, but there's just so much to talk about here. And I think that's more important. I will get to the Q&A, but there's just too much to talk about right now. Very, very quickly, for those of you who don't know, I'm hoping most of you do. Esophageal cancer, it starts with GERD in your stomach, gastroesophageal reflux disease. That acid in your stomach eats away at the bottom of your esophagus, which is connected to your stomach. Over time, it develops precancerous cells. That's a condition known as Barrett's esophagus. People with Barrett's esophagus, between 1 in 50 and 1 in 100 will develop esophageal cancer. The reason why that's so terrible is because roughly 80% of people diagnosed with esophageal cancer will die of it. The big problem in this industry of esophageal cancer is that people are being diagnosed too late. Right now the standard of care is to go to your GI and get an endoscopy where they remove tissue specimens from your esophagus, and then a pathologist studies them under a microscope. The problem is two pathologists will look at the same specimen, same microscope. One will tell you that you have esophageal cancer. One will tell you you don't. It's an inexact science. It's proven by the fact that 80% of people that are diagnosed are dying because they're being diagnosed too late. Okay. There are other tests out there. So just to go through those, a couple of those tests to be clear, there are blood tests. Some of those blood tests out there, you have to understand esophageal cancer grows in the tissue of the esophagus. It doesn't grow in the blood. It takes time for it to seep into the blood because you have so much blood it gets diluted. It takes time before a test will pick it up. You're going to have highly inaccurate results. More importantly, there's some blood tests that may become that are becoming more popular. That's fine. But the next step, if you test positive, is to go get an endoscopy anyway. Our test right now is planned for people who are getting endoscopies. Then we're taking one or two of those specimens. Right now, really just one of those specimens, we run it through a mass spec machine. There's no naked eye even through a microscope that can come close to the AI associated with mass spectrometry machine. That's just a fact. In addition to that, um so the bottom line is blood test if a blood test is successful it leads to endoscopy it's only going to grow the number of endoscopies to actually grow our Target Market it's not the blood tests really aren't competition all right we're working with some great consultants this is really the slide I wanted to get to on this these eight markers these are proteins there are thousands of proteins in the body that you can that you can analyze we the scientists that co-developed this, Joe Abdu, who we just hired to work with our other consultants, he spent years and I believe he spent years studying this and came across the four proteins or markers that are virtually always prevalent when you're developing esophageal cancer. And we have the IP on these markers. Look, a lot of these other markers by some of our competing testing companies, they're testing markers that are not always prevalent, and they might be testing hundreds of proteins. In order to test and search for those proteins or markers, sometimes they need many, many specimens or tissue samples. We only need one or two at the most. Sometimes they even need you doing a second endoscopy. It becomes very difficult to Given the number of specimens they have to look for and also the number of specimens, the protein markers that are looking for don't always exhibit. They're not always expressed when you're developing esophageal cancer. It's not as accurate. Some of these other tests simply are not as accurate. They're not as efficient, but they have the distribution that we don't have yet because they've already started commercialization. So imagine we have a test that's a breakthrough with protein markers that no one else has the IP for. Marry that with a company that has a distribution. This could be a huge success. Huge. So what we're doing is we're going to the next step. The next step is the manuscript. I'm conservative on the timelines, four to eight weeks. I'm hoping it's a lot sooner than that. That then gets published. It then is one step closer to commercialization. At the same time, we can look into commercialization, but not in a way where we would lose money or invest a lot of money. So for example, there are sales forces out there. They're already selling product services and tests into GI's office and doctor's offices. They could take on our test and sell it and we pay them on a per test basis. We just pay them a fee for selling the test as opposed to paying them monthly and taking on overhead. So there are efficient ways that we could do this that we're looking into. We're looking at all angles. But at the end of the day, my first choice would be to potentially partner this joint venture with a very, very large company who would give us a big block of money upfront. all right that that's enough during the q a i can answer more questions about this so suffice it to say you can go to the slide presentation it's on the website you can go through the bullet points the next step as it says here is submit the manuscript uh and so on and so forth but i'm really looking forward to next steps i promise you i'm not going to bankrupt the company developing this test and commercializing it that would be silly i'm doing just the opposite we cut all the overhead to work towards being a profitable company So we will weigh alternatives on next step. I'm just excited that we have this great test with this great IP. It's needed. This is a sorely needed test to save lives. It's that simple. As Joe Abdo and the other scientists working on this, he's working very closely with Dr. Christopher Hartley at the Mayo Clinic. And we're working with M-Probe and others. And everybody's like, we have to get this to the patients to save patients' lives. Of course, me as the CEO of a public company and you as investors want to hear. We also want to get it out there because we want to make money. But it's a win win. You can help people. You can save lives. We can reduce insurance costs by billions of dollars. And so it could be a win win win. All right. A DNA complete. Very simply, we shut down. Laboratory. We built this incredibly efficient laboratory, but it took too long to build it. And the B2B business wasn't there. We're building a D2C business now. We hired Stu Holland said he is a world class marketer. All right. One of the top marketing experts in the country. He helped build up Barstool Sports. He was the COO and head of business for Barstool Sports, built it up into business results for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked very closely. Obviously, he was partnered with Dave Portnoy. He would not have joined our company if he didn't believe in our company and where we are, number one. And number two, so you have Jason Karkas, who completely restructured the business. We're now focused on D2C. we shut down the laboratory he developed relationships with multiple labs now who are competing with each other so we're getting great pricing and so we're in great shape now and a key part of all this is we're selling a subscription when it gets renewed in year two that's pure profit to us so this is a business we build it out this year next year we're gonna it's gonna be a profit machine from all the business that we generate through even if we broke even on generating sales this year That would imply that it's going to make a lot of money next year, even if we don't do anything. So I'm really excited about the business. Of course, Dr. George Church is still an advisor to our company. He's a founder, and he's world-renowned in the field of genomics over the last 20 years. ProPhase supplements, I'll just go through this very, very quickly. These products are already at CVS and Walgreens. We have great infrastructure. We now want to ramp it up. The place to be selling these is online. That's where Stu comes in. We built this whole marketing machine online. Stu is connected to world-class influencers. His reach, I don't know how many tens of millions of people he has reached to, you know, consumers. We get to leverage all of that by Stu being our COO. So we get to leverage it both with DNA Complete. We get great pricing because of Stu. All right. Low CPMs cost per thousand. That's what it costs to advertise. And we get to leverage, leverage our products. Equivir is coming soon. I'm really frustrated by waiting for the final clinical study results. We can't launch this until that happens. It's not cold season now anyway. But I am looking forward to this for next season. We are packaging it. We're doing a lot of things with it right now. Of course, I've run way over time already. And look, we can go through the investment highlights. I pretty much, before we get to the Q&A, I just wanna make sure, I also just want to mention to you that we have a couple of telehealth companies that reached out to us. They built all the infrastructure. They have the medical doctors in each state. They have all the infrastructure in place. What are they all missing? The key to almost any business being successful It's the marketing. It's the reach. That's where we come in. I think that we could potentially acquire one of these telehealth companies on the cheap, not for a lot of money. We're not breaking the bank on anything. And we could, forget everything, we could build that enormous telehealth business just leveraging the marketing expertise and the marketing reach of Stu Holland's head. So we have a lot to look forward to in the company. And I just want to be sure. I'd like to go to the Q&A now. And Noella, I'll turn it over to you. Thankfully, I had a lot to say, but I didn't run over by too much.

Thank you so much, Chad, for the presentation. We'll now begin the Q&A. Your first question is, what is the projected timeline for securing CPT coding approval for the B-SMART test?

Sure. So that takes longer. Sometimes it can happen relatively quickly and sometimes it can take a long period of time. Initially, the goal is to go in two directions on that. The other thing we can do is we can potentially um start submitting with generic cpt codes there are other companies have actually done that successfully there are a number of ways we have some really really good experts that we're working with consultants um including you know we hired joe abdu and added him to our team so we have a number of different avenues but again the key here is and this goes back to someone who asked me a question before the conference school after the press release came out to be clear we're not going to spend a lot of money to ramp up the commercialization of this test. So we have a number of avenues we can go in, but again, and also understand if we, you know, there are other tests in the market, they're asking three, $4,000 or more for the test. Let's suppose we asked $2,500 for a test, but we only get reimbursed by one third of the patients that we test. that would still be an incredibly profitable test for us. And we would be developing distribution and market presence. So understand, we're not going to break the bank. I'm not going to invest a lot of money. I'm not going to dilute shareholders further just to ramp up this test. I won't do that. But what I do want to do is I want to go to the next step with the manuscript. I do want to start some outreach to more outreach actually to the key opinion leaders. Again, we have Joe Abdu. We have Dr. Chris Hartley. the Mayo Clinic, MPRO, and others. We have some universities and so forth. And with publishing of the manuscript, that will go a long way. And we want to get the momentum going. In addition to which, once the marketplace really recognizes and understands our test, I really think there's going to be competition over it to do a deal with us. Because I believe we have the best test on the market. In my heart, I sincerely believe it. There are lots of other companies that are developing esophageal cancer tests. None of them have the eight proteins that we have. And none of them are as statistically accurate as our test. That's my impression based on all the results I've reviewed, based on talking to our consultants, based on talking to our scientists. Somebody asked me, well, what about there's a test out there that tests for 400 proteins. Isn't that better than testing for the eight? The answer is absolutely not. And the reason is because when you're testing for the 400 proteins, first of all, you need multiple specimens to test number one number two the markers they're testing do not express themselves the proteins do not express themselves in a lot of these markers and a lot of the esophageal cancers so if you have esophageal cancer there are eight proteins that are expressed almost every time you then have other proteins sometimes they're expressed sometimes you're not they're not So you might have a test to test 400 proteins, but you're testing all these other proteins. Just think about that compared to testing the eight that are virtually always expressed. Of those eight, based on the studies we did so far, I don't remember the exact number. I can go back to the slide. But a number of them are expressed every single time. So why wouldn't you want to test those? Plus, then you don't need sometimes with these other tests, you actually need a second endoscopy just to get enough specimens, not to mention the fact. um it's not so easy taking all of the specimens from the gi's office here we just need one maybe two but typically we just need one and again we're running this through a mass spec machine uh combined with the ai the you know the super computing power associated with that compare that to a pathologist looking with the naked eye through a microscope no comparison at all. This is going to save lives. And from the point of view of the insurance companies, again, there are roughly 7 million endoscopies performed each year in the United States alone, just on people at high risk of esophageal cancer. Insurance companies are reimbursing $3,000, $4,000. So it's roughly $21 to $28 billion a year. Insurance companies are reimbursing just for the endoscopies. So just imagine if with our test, we can tell you Those eight markers are not being expressed in significance. You're at low risk. You don't have to get endoscopies regularly. That could save many, many billions of dollars for the insurance companies. On the other hand, if you're at high risk and we catch it early in your high risk, you can get an ablation, which is a procedure that destroys the precancerous cells before you develop cancer. Again, it saves lives and saves the insurance companies billions of dollars. To me, this test is a no-brainer, better than any test on the market. We are going the next steps to prove that it is the best test on the market. I have no interest in spending tens of millions, much less millions of dollars to commercialize this. And I won't. And I believe that we can do a deal which will take in potentially tens of millions of dollars to our company. All right. What's the next question, Noelle?

Thank you, Ted. Next is, do you expect the cash paid diagnostic model for the B-SMART test to generate significant revenue in the interim period before CPT approval, or would it be viewed more as a trial period?

Right. So I view it more as a trial period. The idea is to get the product out there, is to get GIs talking about it and get GIs using it and realizing just how important the test this is. That's the goal this year. My point is I'm excited because you know we were talking maybe it's going to be a year two years three years i'm excited that we're going to roll it out and and our goal is to get in gi's offices this year and testing people this year and do it without breaking the bank without spending a lot of money that's the goal at that point i i believe there are several companies that will want to join ventures now having said that we might i might surprise everybody and join venture partner with a large with a very large cancer diagnostic company long before that

but we'll we'll see how this plays out i believe that we're going to have options as to what we do with this thank you for clarifying that your next question is you purchased nebula and the rights to be smart for just a few million dollars each what is the potential you see in these assets that the sellers marketplace does not

I swear that sounds like a short ask that question because we didn't pay a few million dollars or be smart off the top of my head. Don't quote me somewhere around 10 million plus dollars that we paid for a couple of years ago. And we've invested more money. We've developed it further. So it's more about it's significantly more valuable than when we acquired it. We acquired it for, I believe, more north of 10 million dollars. And we acquired it from a company that didn't have the capital and the wherewithal to commercialize it themselves. Otherwise, they would never have sold it to us. And I also believe that they got some shares of stock in our company. So I believe that they will participate on the upside if and when we're successful with it. As far as Nebula is concerned, again, a few million dollars, that's almost an offensive question. We paid, I believe, off the top of my head, approximately $14 million. We probably spent $10 or $20 million building the business. Now, a part of that went into building the lab, which we've now shut down. But we also... significantly improved the go-to-market strategy the offerings we enhanced the ancestry we built a whole dna complete business we also built out dna expand dna expand we can now take an ancestry test and provide you with detailed health related information from your ancestry test So right now, Ancestry companies are charging approximately $69 a year for that service. We'll charge $49 of QuestOS under five. It's an amazing cash cow for us. These are all businesses that we've developed. Nebula, I believe, is worth significantly more than what we paid for it. Now, we might do a quick sale of it because that'll take care of all of our cash flow needs. It'll clean up our debt completely. It'll give us more than enough cash flow. Who knows, might even give us enough cash to buy back some stock. I'm just talking off the cuff. This is not a guarantee I'm doing any of those things. But my point is to say, why is it worth a few million dollars? It's a silly question. But I'm glad the question was asked anyway so that I can address it. Both of these businesses are very valuable businesses. I am excited about the prospects for Nebula Genomics. The biggest issue we have is the timing of liquidity events do we sell it now we could potentially sell it now in the next let's say eight weeks taking a nice block of money take care of all of our cast concerns forever while building our other businesses on the other hand i believe that if we build nebula for the next year it'll be worth significantly more significantly more like multiples of what it's worth today if we waited a year i would also mention i didn't even highlight this i think we might have referred to it um uh in the press release We have a database with significant underlying value. We now have, I think the number's over 60,000 whole genome sequencing tests performed and the data on that. And again, ancestry test study, less than 1% of your DNA we study, virtually 100%. So the amount of data that we're collecting is an enormous amount of data compared to your typical ancestry test, which is a SNP-based test. The database that we have is the equivalent to over 150 million SNP-based ancestry tests. It's an incredible database. It's a hidden value that's a part of Nebula. All right. So, again, if we were to sell Nebula and our database would be a part of it, it's possible. We may not want to sell the database by itself. There may be all kinds of issues. 23andMe has issues, you know, people protecting data. I don't want to get into that. We're not selling people's data or anything like that. But it just gives you an idea of the intrinsic value of Nebula. Next question, please.

Thank you. The next question is, what is the possibility of a reverse split? I have access to quite a few whales, but I don't want to suggest prophase if a reverse split is a possibility in the next year or so.

Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that question. So first of all, when your stock price goes below $1, NASDAQ informs you. Obviously, we were informed you get six months for it to trade back over dollar. However, at the end of those six months, if you've been in compliance in the past and you haven't done reverse splits in the past, they will almost don't quote me, but it's almost automatic. They will give you an additional six months. So we have roughly nine months to deal with this issue. I believe we are going to have significant liquidity events over the next nine months. My hope and expectation is that with any one of those liquidity events that our stock will no longer be trading under a dollar. All right. I don't want to go into more details than that. I can't talk about things like are we going to do stock buybacks and things of that nature. But I am optimistic that that our stock will be trading over a dollar and we won't ever need to do a reverse split. It is not a guarantee. Again, you know, go back to the forward looking statement. I can tell you sitting here today. i feel pretty good about the probability that we will never have to do a reverse split it's no different than when i turned around the company you know a dozen years ago and the stock price was 65 cents i i think we probably asked for an extension got it and then the stock went over a dollar it was never you know we bought back stock i did dutch auctions and bought back even more stock and it wasn't an issue our stock price is so low here if we i mean just imagine crowd medical thinks they're collecting 50 million dollars for us imagine if we even collected 25 million dollars imagine i did a 5 million dollar buyback you know at 50 cents at 50 that's 10 million shares of stock who's selling 10 million shares of stock at 50 cents ridiculous so look we have to i'm just saying that to put that in perspective this is all hypothetical i don't have any issues with the sec but again i just want to put this in some perspective the The market cap of our company compared to the underlying assets are accounts receivable in the other potential liquidity events. Thank you. Next question, please, Noella.

Thank you for clarifying that. Your next question is, what is the update on Equivir? No news on the long-awaited research report and labeling.

Yeah. So I just mentioned that in the presentation, the bottom line is we're waiting for the statisticians and the CRO to complete their final analysis and results. The stuff is complicated. We did a very large study. There were a lot of variables. And there's a lot in it. Again, we got excellent. The early results were, first of all, the preclinical were phenomenal results. And then in the clinical study, the early results were all excellent. I'm just waiting for the final result. We are moving forward with branding the product and the packaging and finalizing the claims and all those other things in concert. So we're waiting. Once we get that final study, we get the write-up, we move forward with all of it. Thank you.

Thank you, Todd. Next, how long do you think it will take to implement the plan and return to profitability? Also, what is your burn rate per month presently?

Great question. I can't get too much into the numbers today. Obviously, we didn't even report the first quarter yet. We're going into the second quarter. I would really like to just focus on the numbers that we put into the press release. The bottom line is we've cut our head count down dramatically not just pmi because we sold pmi but also our headquarters we also shut down our lab the lab alone was i don't know at the top of my head uh our finance team estimated that it cut like six million dollars of overhead just by shutting the lab down all right and pharma laws Lost over two million dollars last year. All right. And and also we had all sorts of payables. We all had all sorts of capital expenditures associated that we have to pay. So it was an enormous cash burn over PMI. Again, our lab was was an enormous cash burn. We're also we're going to be able to cut out. our head our headquarters we're going to move our headquarters it's going to save us close to a million dollars a year just moving our headquarters um and it just goes on and on so i've cut our overhead we're dramatically different company in the second quarter this year i think even then from the first quarter in the first quarter obviously from last year the first quarter as i mentioned sold pmi shut down the lab and um also later in the in the first quarter cut down the overhead um cut out not only the majority of the employees in the company, we also cut out enormous amount. We had over a million dollars a year of IT expense. We cut that down dramatically. So it just cuts everywhere. I want to get to a point where we're virtually there to be in a lean, mean company. And then at the same time, now Nebula Genomics, as I mentioned, it may be we haven't done the final analysis. It depends on how much we spend on advertising. You know, if we only spend a small amount of advertising, we can make it incredibly efficient. If we spend a larger amount, it's not quite as efficient. But I believe that if we wanted to, we could actually make Nebula more a profitable business today. That doesn't mean the company overall, but our overhead has dropped dramatically. I don't want to give exact numbers today, but you'll see, obviously, second quarter is going to be dramatically better than anything you ever saw in 2024. We're basically a different company. That's why I didn't want to spend any time on 2024 numbers. I don't even see the point of it. We are a different company than the company that reported 2024 numbers, you know, without the lab and without PMI and with reducing overhead so much. I'm back to basics. The only reason I wasn't back to basics before, whereas when I took over the company, we built a COVID business, it was so explosive, I had to hire hundreds of people in a very short period of time. It's impossible to be that careful on every dollar of overhead while building a business from zero to $100 million in a matter of months. You can't have it both ways. And so I did the right thing by building up that business, had a tremendous amount of overhead, but had even more revenues and earnings associated. And then again, when we built that Nebula, it was the same approach, except the B2B business wasn't there for Nebula the way it was for COVID. And quite frankly, it was premature to build up that laboratory and take out all that overhead. And so we've now cleaned that up. Jason cleaned all that up. And then Stu came in. He is as tight as Jason. And the two of them went to town and I supported them. You know, the three of us really cut everywhere. And by the way, a shout out to our finance team, our head of finance, Lance Besesar, who, you know, frankly, we sold Farmilaz at the beginning of January. Technically, we wanted to sell it December 31st, but that was a Herculean test. We brought in new auditors, plus sold a major operating asset of the company and to still get our press release out on time on March 31st without even asking for an extension. We could have done the two-week extension. I thought shareholders wouldn't want to hear, oh, what's this extension all about? So I really pressed Lance. I was like, I really want to get this out on time on March 31st, which we did. So I'm really proud of and impressed of Lance and the whole finance team. We actually had people who used to work for our company who came back just to help out, which was incredibly nice. I'm not going to mention them by name. I don't want to embarrass them or I don't know if it's appropriate. And then also thank you to our new auditors, Frucci, who really did a phenomenal job to come in you know, late in the year, our previous orders no longer do public companies, they let us know, like at the last minute, somebody passed away that was very senior at the company. So they no longer do public companies, we had to find new auditors. And so really, Herculean effort, and I appreciate the efforts of all of them. Do we have any more questions?

No, we have a couple more. Okay.

Okay.

Excellent. So this next question is, in today's press release, it looks like you have 700K in the bank. Can you comment on the credit facility and what is the maximum amount you can access?

So look, we can always access capital if we need it. My goal right now is to wrap up a multimillion dollar loan, which will bridge us to either selling Nebula or bridge us to crown medical collections starting to come in. That's the goal. So we've cut overhead tremendously. I'd rather do a loan, even if it was a high interest rate loan, rather than do something with shares and dilute shareholders further. So look, this is a dynamic world. No guarantees on how this all plays out. I haven't closed on the Yolong yet. I'm very optimistic that I'm going to. That should then bridge it and at the same time bridge the gap. And then at the same time, Crown Medical has indicated to me that there may be some low-hanging fruit. We may be able to take in some dollars short-term before we formally bankrupt the subsidiaries and launch litigation against the insurance companies. And then again, once you launch litigation against the insurance companies, some of them will rush to settle before the litigation even gets going. They don't want to spend the time, money, effort. They know that they owe the money. You settle on an amount, and we will be very happy with that. So we have to see. It's a dynamic world. We have to see how this all plays out. but we have all these different liquidity events so I have you know I wish I could give exact answers to people I just can't but at the end of the day my opinion is the stock price should be higher there's a disconnect between the value of the company and the stock price unfortunately we're in a market environment where the stock market doesn't like companies that are losing money that need money So it put us in this position. And now I want to get us out of this position. I never want to have to rely on investment bankers, the stock market again for capital. And so I want to get into a position. And so the best way to get in that position, either sell an asset like Nebula, partner, be smart. There's possibility we partner, be smart, get in a block of money. We have Crown Medical coming in and also potentially I have a loan that I'm lining up. And we'll see the specifics. I don't have the final terms of it, but we're working on that now. So there are a number of variables. I wish I had definitive answers, but I can tell you I'm shareholder friendly. I have been in the past the largest shareholder in the company. I've been a shareholder. Some of my shares I bought at $68 a share in 2008 when I was just an investor. So obviously my heart's with the company. My soul is with the company. with the stock price. I am a shareholder-friendly CEO. I like to think I'm smart. I was smart for 40 years until this last six or nine months. I like to think I'm going to be smart again. And I like to think we've turned the corner in terms of the outlook for the future of our company, in terms of the overhead, the cash flow coming in. I feel like we're in a pretty good place right now. Thank you.

Thank you, Ted. We do have a lot more questions left, but do you have time for one more?

Sure. One more. Can you find me a good one? You don't know the good ones from what I would consider a good one. Go ahead. What's the next one? Let's do one more.

So this last question is, with the closing of 23andMe, does the company plan on increase leveraging that business opportunity to increase revenue through G&E Complete?

Interesting. Interesting question. So look, My perspective on 23andMe is that the ancestry business was a great business. If they had just focused on the ancestry business, they could have made a lot of money. It's a great business. The problem is they had all this cash and cash flow and then went into drug development. Now, what did I say at the beginning? That's exactly what I'm not going to do. We have this great cancer therapeutic called Linebacker. I'm not spending the money to develop it. I bet that's as good as anything that 23andMe wanted to develop. I won't do it. it may create an opportunity we will see what's also interesting is that there are people looking at 23andme's database as being incredibly valuable well guess what we have a database i don't know how big their database is but my guess is off the top of my head our database is multiples of the size of theirs and much more in depth because we're studying the whole genome so when we have information on a test it's significantly more in-depth and more valuable than a SNP-based ancestry test. And as I said, we have the equivalent of 150 million ancestry tests. So if you think they're talking about the 23andMe database being valuable, look at ours. Now, having said that, there's also a lot of issues uh uh about sharing personal information first of all we would de-identify all of the personal information i don't want to get into all the politics involved in that i'm i'm some and i'm not quote uh implying that we're going to sell our database i'm just saying it's a very valuable database and that comes with nebula that's a part of nebula so there's intrinsic value in nebula people don't understand the database is a part of that so the answer is Are there opportunities? Look, we'll see. The bottom line, also among other things, I mentioned our DNA Expand product. We can go after 23andMe's customers. And what happens with 23andMe and MyHeritage and Ancestry.com, you're allowed as a customer to download your data from them. When you download it, you can upload it to us, and we can give you this very valuable health-related information and health insights. uh which probably more in depth than what the ancestry companies are providing you that's the interesting thing you know we've been doing this for seven years we have such an enormous database it's developed so nicely our reporting system is among the best in the world so we can provide some really valuable insights so we can do it a lower price so there's definitely a lot of potential there as well and again the key to all this is marketing and we now have a marketing guru who's ceo of our company It's great having him as a partner. Jason, Stu and I, we do conference calls every day, literally every day. And we're all excited for the future.

Excellent. Thank you very much, Ted, for your responses today. That concludes the Q&A session. But before we go, I will turn back the floor to you, Ted, for final remarks.

Well, I think we covered an awful lot in that hour. I want to appreciate everybody for joining me today and being supportive. Look, on the one hand, I feel bad that our stock price came down over the last couple of years. um i always look at all these other companies where the stock price came down where i say to myself they just didn't know what they were doing i know exactly what i was doing and yet we still got into this position we did for different reasons because we got into cash flow buying from our accounts receivable i want to clean that all up and get back to basics the way i've run the company for the last dozen years and that is paying attention to both the top line and the bottom line, paying attention to the things that affect stock price, paying attention to dilution. Those are all things that got thrown out the door over the last six or nine months. I want to get back to basics. We're already 80% of the way there between selling PMI between shutting down the laboratory, between cutting headcount dramatically, cutting IT expenses dramatically. We're moving out of our headquarters, which is another almost million dollars a year. I mean, we're just cutting everywhere so that we are a lean, mean company. The amount of capital it will require to run the company in the future will be a mere fraction of what it costs in the past. And at the same time, we've got these great assets to develop. We have a history of being successful in developing assets. And I'm really looking forward to very positive reports and surprises in the future. Everybody have a great day. Noelle, as always, thank you for being the moderator. I love having you on these calls. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ted. And once again, this was ProPhase Labs trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PRPH. Thank you everyone for joining us today for ProPhase Labs fourth quarter and year end 2024 results. Stay tuned for the next quarterly call and see you next time.