Mr. Gingras: The company actually came to life as it is now in 2003. The first team of management that came aboard in 2003 had very big plans for the company in biopharmaceutics, but the plan was big and it lacked focus, so the company ran out of money. In 2006 a second team of management took over, which did an outstanding job of implementing a stricter business plan, really focusing on the technology transfer, meaning that the company has to produce a recipe book for generic biopharmaceutical drugs and get revenues from there. It had an initial project of producing a generic version of the rituximab drug, which is a blockbuster drug that came in the market about 10 years ago, and which so far sold at probably something in the vicinity of 5 billion worldwide. We are still involved in that project. But we still ran out of money at the end of 2007. So as a third team of management, we came in 2008 and the company was on the brinks of bankruptcy, and from there we took it where it is now with a much more comfortable status.
TWST: What is your business plan?
Mr. Gingras: Quite simply, we produce a recipe book of how to do the generic version of a product. We deliver the clients a recipe book, the first clones of the first proteins, to help them start and make the process involved into the generic version of the drug. What we do is we identify which drug should be produced as a biogeneric, and that's what we offer. That's actually quite simple and quite straightforward. Our laboratory is located in the Biotech Research Institute of the Canadian National Research Council in Montreal, and we are using their facilities and some of their technologies to help us produce a very efficient level of proteins that will evolve into the biogeneric drugs. We look at the potential drug, and we evolve that, and we describe the process, and that's what we offer the clients.
Tickers included in this excerpt: VPRO.PK
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