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“The
Life Shirt” can save lives
Healthcare
Medical Equipment & Supplies
(OTC: NIMU)
Non-Invasive Monitoring Systems, Inc.
1840 West Avenue
Miami Beach, Fl 33139
Phone: 305-534-3694
Allan F. Brack
President and
Chief Executive Officer
Interview conducted by:
Diane Reynolds, Co Publisher
CEOCFOinterviews.com
September 18, 02
Company
Profile:
Non-Invasive
Monitoring Systems, Inc. (Nims) Miami Beach, Florida, USA develops hardware devices based
upon sensors placed externally on the body surface, which provide diagnostic information,
through proprietary software, for cardio respiratory and sleep disorders in infants,
children and adults. These devices can also
sound alarms for adverse cardiac and respiratory events in critically ill patients. In addition, Nims continues to improve its
non-invasive devices for assessment of sleep disorders and cardio respiratory diseases and
sleep. Nims have developed a non-invasive
therapeutic motion platform for the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular and other
diseases once regulatory approval has been obtained.
Ceocfointerviews: Please explain to my readers, who is this company
and what is it involved in?
Mr. Brack:
Non-Invasive Monitoring Systems is a company that has been around for over twenty years. Essentially it was exactly what the name implies,
it was a company that made monitoring devices for sleep labs and pulmonologic examinations
in people’s breathing patterns. It is
pretty much the gold standard if you will in the industry for doing specific sleep lab
studies. About two years ago, the company
decided it really needed to change itself or reinvent itself from being essentially the
sleep lab side and some R&D to a more full service type company and marketing,
manufacturing and selling. Everything you
would expect from a full service company. One
of the product lines that the term came up with was the “Life Shirt”. A company out in California called “People
Metrics” now sells this. They have had a
lot of play by Peter Jennings, TNN and other services that were interested in what the
technology was about. That technology was sold to People Metrics on a royalty basis. We will get a nice revenue strain from them over
the next few years. That has pretty much put
us out of R&D as far as the pulmonology end of it goes.
That being our last project. We
are now working on a device called the AT101, which was recently submitted to the FDA, and
we are now actually allowed to sell. This is
a device really increases patients joint mobility as well as increasing circulation in
general terms. This device got quite a bit of
interest from people who are dealing with patients with pain issues like arthritics. They are looking for a way to treat patients
without using pharmaceutical agents to get the appropriate affect. That is a thumbnail for you.
Ceocfointerviews: Is it true that cardiovascular diseases are also
related to sleep disorders?
Mr. Brack:
Yes they can be although that is rather a lesser issue.
Usually the sleep disorders are created by a little bit of fat growing in
the throat which creates the snoring and makes the patient wake up in the middle of night
gasping for breathe, which also leaves them off to a sleep lab to find out what it is. Is it a central issue, a problem created in the
brain, which is relatively rare, or is it a physical issue, which could be taken care of
by surgery or some less difficult problem than a brain issue.
Ceocfointerviews: Your products are available in different areas
and units, such as hospitals or clinics?
Mr. Brack:
We are pretty much with the base product lines that the company first came out with the
Respite Tray and Respite Band which is the way we measure breathing, they are pretty much
throughout the country or for that matter, throughout the world. The AT101, the motion platform which we are now
beginning to sell, that is new, which we will be seen on a large basis over the next
couple of years. We just appointed our first
distributor in Japan and another one in Korea and moving in that direction internationally
at first since it is easier to get through internationally from a sales point of view. We will also be expanding in the US market
beginning next month.
Ceocfointerviews: The US market is basically a newer market for you
then.
Mr. Brack:
Yes it is. It is rather restrictive with this
type of device. I will be showing our device for the first time at the Acampo meeting,
which comes up this week actually in Fort Lauderdale.
There are 400 doctors coming in from various specialties that are looking
for unusual ways for treating patients with pain disorders and/or joint mobility issues.
Ceocfointerviews: The first product you spoke of “The Life
Shirt” what exactly is that for?
Mr. Brack:
The Life Shirt is a way of measuring people’s breathing patterns along with some
thirty other parameters, including heart rate, ECG, arrhythmia, positions when they sleep
or when they move around, under what conditions. Their
initial thrust will be going out to the market to deal with pharmacy patients where drug
companies are interested in trying to collect a lot of data over a relatively short period
of time rather than to do it all by hand. With the life shirt they have a device for them
to collect massive amounts of data daily from quite a different amount of patients, which
obviously shortens the time with market potentially.
Ceocfointerviews: This sounds so exciting for you. This can be used to collect a lot data to be used
for multiple purposes.
Mr. Brack:
Yes, we are hoping that they do extremely well as we are obviously in the royalty business
with that product line, the better they do, and the better we will do.
Ceocfointerviews: Are you manufacturing all of the products
yourselves or are they outsourced?
Mr. Brack:
Another company makes The Life Shirt, they pay us a royalty. They manufacture it themselves, we designed the
software and they manufacture it. As far as
the respite traces are concerned, we manufacture that, but the band that are attached to
it or the sensors are made by a company called “Riarsess”, formerly known as
“Sensor Medics. Who also pay us a
royalty on everything they sell or manufacture? We make the actual boxes that do the
analytical side.
Ceocfointerviews: Because the company has changed its focus on its
direction, is the focus going forward on new software and new devices to be incorporated
as technology changes?
Mr. Brack:
Certainly we will keep that up, however, our long-term goal is going to be on the motion
platform, the AT101, which is essentially a device that moves people back and forth from
head to toe at a very rapid pace. This allows
them to literally get rid of a lot pain issues and mobility problems.
Ceocfointerviews: Lately more and more people are seeking medical
professions to deal with pain.
Mr. Brack:
Without a doubt, pain management has become a big issue in the US amongst other countries
and throughout the Western world as well. The
idea that I have to be in pain all of the time has become no longer acceptable and a lot
of people will go to great lengths to find traditional and alternative ways to deal with
pain and manage it.
Ceocfointerviews: Would you consider yourself one of the
alternative methods of pain medicine?
Mr. Brack:
Yes indeed. Most of the pain management that
is done is by various drugs, our system does not use drugs at all, and so, from my
perspective it is an alternative way to deal with pain.
Ceocfointerviews: It is a very exciting time because I know
alternative medicine is starting to become widely accepted and used.
Mr. Brack:
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that we are strictly alternative
medicine; there is a lot of good science behind this.
The device has been published a number of times on what we have done to date
from Mt. Sinai hospital and Miami Beach and amongst other places that are looking at this
device and what kinds of applications it will have in the day to day medical world. So it
is all alternative in a sense that it is not a device that you would normally think of to
use for pain or mobility management, but that is as far as it goes. It is still a medically sound way of treating
these patients.
Ceocfointerviews: Can this be done at home as well as in the
hospital?
Mr. Brack:
We think it will become a home product but it will take three or four years before that
will happen. The most logical place would be
in the home it is something you can treat yourself easily without having a lot of input
from someone else, it either works for you or it doesn’t. We suspect that would happen is it would start as
a position based product as doctors will ultimately prescribe the device for home use if
the patient has the ability to purchase it. We
really aren’t there yet and that’s at least two years away.
Ceocfointerviews: To grow the company, do you see any acquisitions
in your future?
Mr. Brack:
In terms of us purchasing, no, the short term not. We
are so focused on this one area that we doubt we would be interested in any acquisition at
all. In the long term, I wouldn’t be
surprised if people telephone us and inquire about acquiring us because of the impact we
think we are going to have in the form of medicine.
Ceocfointerviews: Looking at the company, there isn’t much
left in R&D, do you have the cash and/or credit to grow the way you want?
Mr. Brack:
Yes, it does take a lot of cash to grow, especially internationally but we recently did a
positive placement that was announced two months ago that has helped us a lot and it will
certainly get us into the first stages of marketing.
We’ve got the cash to be able to get out in the market place to prove
that the product works and then at which point we’ll review whether that is enough
for us to continue or if we will have to go to the well again, that will be issue.
Ceocfointerviews: Some of it is on the global end, how much of your
revenue is coming from the international market?
Mr. Brack:
We’ve just started internationally and that is unfair to ask at this point, I would
answer in the short term that 50% of our total turnover to be international, that has been
my experience in the past and I can’t see why that would change. The international market is obviously vibrant and
there is a lot of interest from every type of specialty you can think of in American
medicine, so anything that you can think of coming out of America is looked at favorably
until proved otherwise.
Ceocfointerviews: What do you feel has been the biggest impact on
the company as far as growth is concerned?
Mr. Brack:
Without a doubt it would have to he the change over from going from an R&D base to a
full service company. The R&D Company has
a nice little revenue stream but you can grow it. There
is fine lined amount that you can get from a three or five year royalty contract from
someone. You are actually manufacturing a
product going out into he field and selling them you can build value from the production
point of view as well as from an asset base point of view.
Ceocfointerviews: I think the biggest challenge a company like
yourselves faces is the education. What means
do you use to get your products out?
Mr. Brack:
What we have done with the AT101 is go out and find opinion leaders to actually use the
device and then report what they think of it in their peer journals. We have devices in
Mt. Sinai and reports are coming out of their journals, but we are also talking with
Hammer Smith in London, we’ve got a trial coming up in Beijing, with a University
Hospital there and another one in Switzerland in a University that all of those combined
get the message out to peer groups that this is a device that works in x amount of areas. It is really a function of each individual
hospital to look at the specific type of disease state or condition state and publish it
based on that. We are trying to spread the
device on many different potential areas that we think are sufficient to a patient and get
people to publish their views on it. Those
published reports really form the basis of your entire market form. You have legitimacy,
you can show that the product works you can create confidence from both the patients point
of view as well as the doctors that we’ve done and used the device, and that’s
our front end trend and we will be putting on distributors from the sales side as well as
doing trade shows, some advertising and specific types of organs that are peer related as
far as logistics is concerned.
Ceocfointerviews: As the company grows and the products become in
demand will you be able to fill that need?
Mr. Brack:
Absolutely, right now we are using a subcontractor to build most of it with the final
electronics being done. Their capacity is
well over a 1,000 platforms a year, which would live us over $30 million dollars worth of
sales a year. I don’t see the production
problem as being a problem; we will look for secondary or alternative solutions as well. We are essentially electronics, the table that we
use in acceleration therapeutic device, the AT101 is looks like a gurney or hospital bed
so there is a lot of metal involved and we don’t have to recreate the wheel where
there is a metal shop here when there are so many good companies that do that.
Ceocfointerviews: Are you using your website for any other purpose
other than information?
Mr. Brack:
Right now it is essentially informational, but we will be changing it to a marketing one
in the near future. Recently we hired Richard
Buckley that is fairly wide known as a financial marketing expert in the medical device
area and one of his tasks is going to be to redefine the website and the kind of
information marketing that we do via the website along with other areas. A lot of people turn to the web for information, I
do it three or four times a day, you go to some search engine or another and try to find
the information you need. We want to be able
to provide that information in one way or another via the web.
Ceocfointerviews: To a potential investor, why this company?
Mr. Brack:
Well I’m here because I want to know why. If
I looked at the company when I came on board which is a year ago and essentially been
doing the same thing for about 20 years the goal was to turn it into a new direction and
to grow the stock. That is how I spend the
majority of my time to think about how to increase shareholder value, to build value in
the company build our hazard base. For the shareholder, as I am one, my personal store on
the company, if that isn’t a vote of confidence on the company then I don’t know
what is.
Ceocfointerviews: Do you have any closing comments or statements
for my readers?
Mr. Brack: I
think my stock is unbelievably undervalued and watch us.
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