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TWST: What benchmarks or milestones should investors use to judge progress?

Mr. Collier: If you look at the most ambitious of our science projects, we (Nasdaq:GZBX) have two angiogenesis programs in clinical trials. I think investors will certainly want to watch as we finish trials and achieve clinical milestones, and see that the data are supportive and that we move to the next phases of these trials. This will also hold true for the area of cell therapy. There are a couple of products we have on the market using autologous cells, the patient’s own cells. There are other products that we’d like to put on the market. We want to see the same kind of conventional milestones with these programs, progress moving them into clinical trials and moving them through these trials. In the biomaterials area, I think we have a number of products that are either in clinical trials now or will be going into trials. Because the nature of these products is such that they require a little less clinical work and the scientific risk is a little lower, I think people should reasonably expect to see a number of these products reach the market in the next three to five years, particularly in the areas of adhesion prevention, drug delivery and management of osteoarthritis.

TWST: You’ve said that the surgical marketplaces have not always been well understood by biotech. Would you explain that just a little bit?

Mr. Collier: It’s interesting, if you think about the usual pharmaceutical or biotech products, they’re sold to medical doctors, and it’s a certain kind of consultative sell. I’m sure you’re very familiar with the phrase “pharmaceutical detailing.” It’s sort of brute-force selling. To make sure people are staying in touch, they give out articles and samples, but in some ways it’s not particularly intense with respect to any one doctor. But if you want to call on a surgeon, you often have to find him in the operating room. Many of our products are used in surgery, and the surgeon wants the surgical device representative or the surgical products representative in the operating room to be able to answer questions sometimes. Even a very well-trained surgeon will have a technical question about the use of a product that comes up during surgery, and the product representative has to stand there with him and answer that question about product performance and so forth. It’s a much more intensive kind of selling exercise — you cover much less ground; you have relatively fewer doctors in your target group — but you have much more detailed relationships with them. If the surgeon trusts you to stand in the operating room to see what he is doing and how the procedure is going, he will pay more attention when you bring a new product to him. It’s just a more detailed, intimate — and expensive, I might add — sales process that takes a different kind of representative, but if you’re going to sell surgical products successfully, that’s what you have to do. You cannot do it with brute force.

TWST: Could you comment briefly on the character of your sales force?

Mr. Collier: We have sales representatives who come from different backgrounds. Although many of them come out of the device industry they call on surgeons in just the way that I described: they are very comfortable going into the operating room, talking to the surgeon about the procedures that the surgeon is performing and about the use of the product in the procedure.