Posted on Oct 12th, 2009 by Rik J. Deitsch

On Friday, an article came out from Dow Jones Newswires that discussed Nutra Pharma and our launch of Cobroxin. While the article was factually correct and well written, the author left out critical pieces of information that failed to tell the entire story about Nutra Pharma.

While at first glance, our balance sheet looks soft. We have several million dollars in liabilities and our latest quarterly from the SEC reported little cash in-hand. But at closer inspection, one would realize that over the years, I have funded the company over $3 million out of my own pocket to continue our drug development work on Multiple Sclerosis (MS), pain, HIV/AIDS, and Adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN). Because of my strong belief in our pipeline, I chose to provide this financing as a loan to the company, instead of diluting shareholders. This financing now makes up the majority of the $3.1 million liability.

Today, the company is as strong as ever. Not only are we in the process of launching our first product in the United States, but we are also much stronger financially with over $2.5 million in cash that we plan to use to finance the manufacturing of Cobroxin and additional clinical studies for our other drug indications.

As we move forward with the launch of Cobroxin this week, it is important that our customers and shareholders understand the history of the product and its clinical profile. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in our branded pain reliever, Cobroxin, is Asian cobra venom. We have been studying cobra venom for the past 10 years at our drug discovery subsidiary, ReceptoPharm under the supervision of Dr. Paul Reid. Dr. Reid acts as the CEO of ReceptoPharm and is one of the world’s foremost experts on cobra venom. He first started studying it when he was at the United States Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, under a grant from the National Research Council in Washington, D.C.

Cobra venom dates further back than Dr. Reid’s original work in the early 1990s. It has been used in the U.S. for over 75 years and has a well understood clinical application. There are 46 human clinical trials dating back to the 1930s and 20 pre-clinical studies using cobra venom to treat pain, including some of the most recent work being completed by Dr. Paul Reid from ReceptoPharm and Dr. Zheng-Hong Qin, who divides his time between Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Soochow University in Suzhou, China.

Unfortunately, a point of confusion in the recent article was that it stated that Nutra Pharma is in the process of completing human clinical trials in an effort to gather as much information as possible about Cobroxin. In fact, we are planning to conduct an additional trial for Nyloxin Rx, our prescription pain reliever, to compare its efficacy to other prescription pain medicines. We believe that the results of this comparison study could provide us with excellent evidence showing that Nyloxin Rx should be the preferred method of treatment for severe (Stage 3) chronic pain. Additional details will be released as we move into the launch of Nyloxin Rx.

While we would like to claim Cobroxin as a new product, it is not. Cobra venom has been used as a therapeutic agent in China for thousands of years for a variety of different purposes. Additionally, here in the United States, cobra venom is a U.S. monographed drug under the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia (HPUS) and was used as a pain killer by the United States government during World War II.

As cortisone became popular and other pain killers became accessible in the United States, people stopped using cobra venom primarily because it lacked standardization. 50 years ago, the technology to measure the amount or type of peptides and whether there was bacterial or fungal contamination did not exist. Additionally, there were no tools available to properly clean, sterilize and standardize the solution, so patients would end up with ineffective and bad batches. Today, however, with our understanding of cobra venom peptides and the technology that we have available, we can tell you exactly what is in every batch and verify that it is sterile, clean and that it is going to be effective. Our understanding of this product and the technology we have available to us is why I believe cobra venom will once again become a staple for treating pain.

A critical part of the launch of Cobroxin is our licensing partnership with XenaCare Holdings. What drew us to XenaCare was not only the company’s commitment to a several million dollar roll-out, but also its relationship with a broker network that is considered among the leaders in the industry with a history for launching successful products, several of which now have over a billion dollars in sales. While we are confident that XenaCare is fully-capable of completing a successful launch of Cobroxin by utilizing its available financial and human capital, our agreement, as would any out-licensing agreement, requires XenaCare to meet certain minimum performance requirements.

If you would like to learn more about the science behind Cobroxin, I invite you to click here to listen to a webinar I hosted last month discussing the product. I believe this will help clarify the science behind the Cobroxin and why cobra venom is effective for treating Stage 2 chronic pain.

In summary, I would like to reiterate how excited we are about Nutra Pharma and the blockbuster potential of our drug discovery platform. As we move forward on all of our initiatives and transition into a revenue producing company, I would like to invite you to reach out directly to our investor relations department at (877) 895-5647 or by email at [email protected] with any questions you have about the Company. We pride ourselves on remaining as transparent as possible to our shareholders and will continue with this effort as we complete the launch of Cobroxin and the continued develop of our drug pipeline.