Video Transcription
Jeff Luber 00:02
So I'm gonna talk to you about an infection, a combination of infections that are not often talked about, but are certainly at epidemic levels. So when COVID hit, the world stood still, rightly so, and thankfully, it receded. But there continue to be infections that circulate at epidemic levels, and chlamydia and gonorrhea are two of them. Fill a room with 100 people, and three people have chlamydia and gonorrhea, or gonorrhea; fill that same room with a bunch of 20-year-olds, and the numbers are two to three times that. Okay, and the reason that's a big deal is because in most cases, it's asymptomatic, so nothing hurts, nothing burns, nothing itches. But for women, that can mean infertility. If it's undetected, there's a lot of comorbidities. And the problem also is it continues to spread. You have an asymptomatic infection in a population. In the United States, there are 100 million sexually active unmarried people; those infections spread. Okay, so for COVID, there was a lot of very good testing. A lot of people focused on it. The press picked up on it and helped with screening for these infections. The press doesn't give you as much attention, and let me tell you what we're doing about it. So our goal at Binx Health is we're bringing point-of-care testing, rapid on-site testing, to the masses. All right, so there's about 500 million chlamydia and gonorrhea infections every year globally, 500 million, give or take. For every one of those infections, you have a choice. People will get a sample taken; it gets sent out to a central laboratory for processing, and an answer comes back. In some cases, that answer comes back in a couple of days. If you're in the UK, it comes back in about three weeks. In some places, it's even longer. So think about what happens during that interval between the time you got your sample taken and when the result comes in. Well, you're probably still sexually active. You may still have anxiety. Am I positive? Am I not? And so, anytime there's a delay between test and treatment, that's not good in the world of diagnostics. So Binx Health, for those 500 million people, is the only company that can now collapse the time to 30 minutes on-site. So now that same person walks into a clinic; instead of walking out without an answer, the answer is generated while they're still in the time envelope of that clinic. So before they leave, the doctor, clinician, or nurse sits down and says, "Look, you're positive for chlamydia. I know nothing hurts. It's highly curable. It's very important you take this prescription. Here's the prescription before you leave the door." Just that conversation alone changes health outcomes. Who has long talked about this? The CDC has long talked about it, and it's one of the reasons we were awarded a very rapid FDA clearance—two of the fastest FDA clearances in history, as far as I know—for a male product and a female product. Self-collected urine sample for a man, self-collected vaginal swab for a woman in a clinic. CLIA waived, meaning it's easy to use, so hundreds of thousands of sites, and we're the only product that can do it for both men and women in a CLIA waived setting that quickly. Now, I hope there are others that come because it's an important area, and there's no way we could test everybody, but for a lot of good reasons, our technology continues to be out in front, and a lot of big companies continue to go after it. But we've spent the last, I would say, six or seven years really de-risking a platform. So if you think about diagnostics and the arc of things that any diagnostic company needs to go through, it's been brick by brick, knocking those things off: technical risk, regulatory risk, reimbursement risk, commercial risk, and we're now on the market to fast forward. We're on the market in a multi-billion dollar opportunity in the United States, with five of the biggest national distributors at our side, 1,400 sales reps, and a business model which is a recurring revenue stream, multi-year contracts for every instrument we place with a razor, razor blade model. We're selling cartridges every month to feed those instruments. So it's a really, really nice business model and has a geometric impact over time. For every instrument that's placed, we outsource our manufacturing globally. So we have cartridge manufacturing in Ireland and in China. Our instruments are manufactured in Germany; we have a global supply chain, and we're feeding a US market that continues to grow month over month, and we have aspirations for X US that'll be driven by reimbursement and by regulatory speed. But there's plenty of work to do in the United States right now, and that's really what we're focused on. I have a really expert team, phenomenal investors at our side that have long believed in the vision, the mission, and continue to support us. We've raised about $200 million to date. There have been others that have come and gone. Maybe I have a competitive matrix in here somewhere, but it hasn't changed much in the seven years I've been running the company. It's really kind of interesting. I've been in diagnostics for a long time, and I've never had the privilege to be the sole player in a category as big as this because usually the Abbots and the Siemens and the Roches and everybody else run toward it, and they are trying, but ultimately, they're not there yet. So again, in all of health care, if you collapse the time between identification of a problem and treatment of the problem, you win. Any, pick a disease. And so we pick chlamydia and gonorrhea. You know, we could look after, we could do respiratory; we can do other things. But we picked those two, number one, because there's value in staying focused, especially in very, very large markets, and the platform lends itself to expansion. So add another test to the cartridge. To the test cartridge, you've added $15 or $20 in reimbursement and about $1 of cost of goods. That's a really nice model for an already installed base. Great partners focused, obviously, brands that folks know, and they don't bump into each other in the market. They're all in adjacent verticals. So think about urgent care, student health centers, emergency rooms, OB/GYN clinics. It's almost, it's actually, it's a paradox because it's actually too many opportunities; you can get overwhelmed quite quickly, and you want to incentivize the sales force to focus, and we spend a lot of time on that. This is the instrument. It really is that you can launch a moderately complex product, but to get to a CLIA waived product where literally anybody with an eighth-grade education, a nurse preferably in the front office, so you're not taking a physician's time, can pipet a sample right into the hole in the top of the cartridge, put the cartridge in the tray, close the tray, and press go and get a binary answer, positive or negative. That's as good as it gets. Okay? And we got that CLIA waiver a couple of years ago. And the competitive advantage of that is it doesn't matter what chemistry is on the cartridge. If you added respiratory, the user engagement is the same. So you have a very high probability of also having your CLIA waived next product. You're not changing anything in the form factor, the functionality, the interface. You're just changing the chemistry on the cartridge. Let's talk about economics for a second. So we manufacture a cartridge. The other key focus of ours is, you know, top line is obviously a focus. The other focus is cost of goods. We can drive this cartridge down to below $10 a cartridge. So we're selling it to our distributors for, call it $40. All right, so when we sell a cartridge to a McKesson for, call it, call it $40, they then sell it to a clinic. They add a markup to that. That markup can be $70 to $80 to $90, but these are the reimbursement levels in those states for chlamydia and gonorrhea. That doesn't mean every state is perfect. You go down to Louisiana or somewhere in the Deep South; you can't make money at all down there. And I hate to say it, but that's how these businesses work. Ultimately, when you get your cost of goods low enough, you can go into the Medicaid markets and really build those markets in those areas, and then ultimately you get it far enough, low enough, maybe even below $5, you can go after third-world opportunities and really do a lot of good globally. So this was my last slide, but this was the matrix seven years ago. Okay, we were the only one that solved those 12 things. I'm not going to go through them all, but to be adopted on a mass basis, you've got to have all those features. You've got to think about this stuff from a design standpoint. And there are others coming. They continue to come, and we're right to stay paranoid, but to this date, electrochemical detection on our platform continues to carry the day. Okay? Thank you very much. You.
