looking at excerpts:
Technosphere is the platform and the technology underlying are [leap] [ph] program in Afrezza. We still believe in that technology. We do expect that we'll be partnering that technology.
It's a very active effort.
in addition to outside licensing of the technology as well, which has gotten renewed interest.
So clearly the Technosphere pipeline is something that's important to us. It’s going to be important from a licensing standpoint. This is probably not huge upfront dollars, but I think and in fact I think, if that were very close to when I or I think my predecessor promised me we have in this quarter. I actually thought we have one today. That didn’t happen, but I think it will happen soon.
there will be more of these and these are things that could actually yield some short term cash and not huge upfront dollars, but some of the milestones are quite near term and could make a big difference for us to show that the technology is sustainable. There is interest in it and there is lot of places we can use it.
we can also be opportunistic with these licensing opportunities and I think you’ll see more emphasis on that in the future.
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So, how we’re going to make this work and how we’re going to turn this around? Obviously the key thing is we need to increase the market demand for the product and get the production volumes up.
we think we need to readdress the pricing strategy that Sanofi implemented. Most of you know about that.
Those who go way back with we remember I used to talk about this as always being priced at parity. Ultimately Sanofi decided to price it at a significant premium. Clearly we can readdress that. I think that we'll have a great deal of impact on the sales volumes and maybe perhaps more importantly the -- our ability at reimbursement from insurance companies and so forth.
maximum benefit from this with minimal dollars outlaid, which is an important thing is in the social media.
Many will remember we used to talk about our international strategies way before we partnered globally with Sanofi and had a lot of interest in many foreign jurisdictions.
Those discussions have been reopened. It would be very nice to get some of those distribution arrangements underway. I think that’s going to be very important to us because as it has a kind of a double whammy effect.
Clearly any upfront dollars we could get from into those transactions would be hugely helpful for us at this time, but equally important or maybe more so is getting the sales volumes up.
But this product is very volume sensitive and getting those volumes up will have a very nice impact on our margins anywhere in the world including the United States.
There is something I coined as the Afrezza Advocate Counsel.
specialized diabetes care centers.
Real Time Diabetes Management
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We did expect to finish in the $59 million-$60 million range here in cash.
our strategy for some of the international markets
We do have some other non-critical assets. I think it’s fairly well known that we had a facility we opened in Valencia, California, which was now vacant and on the market for sale, which could raise some money.
The key we need to and frankly I don’t want to go too far down this path, but as we negotiated with Sanofi and determine that orderly wind down of that negotiation, we'll see how that turns out.
Some of these licensing programs are international programs that change the momentum pretty dramatically in a relative short period of time and should govern where we need to raise more money at some point, however will be in a much better position to do so than obviously we’re now.
The key thing is we will be in charge of Afrezza and marketing it in the near term. We think we can move some of the barriers and take advantage of some of the learnings that we have from our experience with Sanofi to change how we go about this. Make the patient experiences better and remove some of the insurance obstacles.
There are other partnering opportunities that are a little more innovative that have been discussed and we're thinking about.
Those efforts are underway. We were obviously not able to do that until we got official notice from Sanofi, but now with that notice it is now a non-exclusive license. So we can have some serious discussions with others. Those are just starting now and I hope I'll have more to tell you about that.
