John Bonfiglio, president and CEO of Orgenics Inc., explains lantibiotics and probiotics

In a recent video, Orgenics Inc.’s President and CEO John Bonfiglio explains various biotech products and projects that his company is undertaking.

He says he joined Orgenics over a year and a half ago because he saw the company as a “rough gem” in the world of biotech.

He states,

“Here’s a company that had a pipeline full of very exciting and interesting products—potentially blockbuster products—in the area of antibiotics and probiotics. I felt that my expertise in the areas of developing drugs and in marketing products would lend itself to this company in a great fashion and produce a great deal of value for shareholders and potential customers.”

Bonfiglio lists off lantibiotics—a class of antibiotics for the use of resistant forms of diseases—and probiotics as two projects that Orgenics is working on. He says that the company is developing lantibiotics for use against antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, for example, alongside Intexon Corp., which is owned by Randal J. Kirk.

“The technology that we’re using will help us produce large quantities of these lantibiotics, which can be used to treat diseases in many different countries around the world and many different disease states,” he says.

Bonfiglio explains that “probiotics are defined as giving a dose of a living organism to a person in a quantity that will allow it to elicit some sort of beneficial effect.” He says that Orgenics has developed Probior 3, which is a mixture of three different strains of bacteria that are specifically designed to work on the mouth instead of the stomach. He states that the probiotic area has a huge opportunity in developing countries where people do not have access to toothbrushes or tooth paste, and not everyone brushes their teeth.

He explains the concept behind this probiotic:

“The idea behind this is that in any human there is about 850 different species of bacteria. A lot of them are very bad players that can cause gum disease and tooth decay. The reason why they don’t cause more damage is because there are beneficial bacteria that actually help to keep those bacteria in check. The idea behind Probior 3 is to actually overwhelm the mouth with these beneficial bacteria and displace the bacteria that can cause tooth decay and gum disease overtime.”

Bonfiglio says that the probiotics can be easily distributed worldwide, and that the lantibiotics and probiotics are being sold in the United States as a food supplement to whiten teeth and improve breath and general oral health.

Watch the full video below.

Bonfiglio worked as the president, CEO and director for Transdel Pharmaceuticals Inc. He also worked as the president and CEO of Argos Therapeutics in Durham, NC, as well as the CEO of The Immune Response Corporation in Carlsbad, Calif. He was also the CEO of Peregrine Pharmaceuticals and held senior management positions with Cypress Biosciences, Baxter Healthcare and Allergan Inc.

A Conversation with Dr. Thomas Starzl: A Giant in Medicine

In a recent video, Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center answers questions about his career as the “Father of Modern Transplantation.”

Throughout his career, Starzl invented techniques and models for managing heart blockages, performing transplants, and working with immunosuppressants. He performed the first successful liver transplant in 1967 and refined the use of immunosuppressive drugs. Due to his efforts over the last 50 years, thousands of patients with end-stage liver disease have been able to live long and active lives.

Starzl describes his career as beginning in 1945 after he was discharged from the navy. He used the G.I. Bill to go into medical school. He says that he pulled inspiration from his mother, who was a nurse and of whom he thought highly. In 1947, he received his BA and went off to medical school at Northwestern University. He explains why he dropped out of school for almost a year: to do “pure research” in neuroscience, in which he received his Ph.D. After joining John Hopkins, he delved into “another side alley of cardiac physiology.”

He says:

“After we had encountered complete heart block in some of the early heart operations, and needed to develop some way to deal with that complication, I developed a model of complete heart block in dogs, studied the complete physiology, figured out how to do pace making, and solved the problem.”

He then became interested in metabolism. He explains that he developed models of transplantation that involved either the liver alone or the liver with other abdominal viscera, and then became interested in transplantation biology. He says that the real opportunity in this field of clinical studies was to study rejection patterns in liver allographs for the first time. 

Starzl faced so much uncertainty about the nature of his research at the time that it was difficult to receive funding. He says that somehow he thought that everything would turn out all right, and that his greatest source of anxiety was actually the uncertainty of not knowing what to do.

He says,

“I referred to myself at one time as a missile searching for a trajectory. I was bursting with energy. I really wanted to do something that wasn’t conventional, that wasn’t bread and butter surgery as a means of making money; I wanted to do something important that would have a life of its own—that would endure. But what to do? I had come to be regarded as a dilatant, having gone through a Ph.D. in neuroscience and then a Ph.D. equivalent in working out the heart block problem, and now here I was wondering around, not pursuing either field. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.”

He went on to travel across the country and continue conducting clinical trials in order to work with liver transplants, realizing that a successful liver transplants and functions required healthy kidneys. He says he remembers his patients from clinical trials as if they were family members.

Watch the full interview below.

AtheroNova ($AHRO) C.E.O. Thomas W. Gardner on atherosclerosis market size (video)

AtheroNova (OTCBB: AHRO) is an early stage biotech company focused on discovery, research, development and licensing of novel compounds to reduce or regress atherosclerotic plaque deposits.

In this film, AtheroNova C.E.O. Thomas W. Gardner speaks about the market size for atherosclerosis:

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