Nanotechnologies aren’t some future development. The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies estimates that almost 1,000 products that place confidence in nanotech are that you can purchase now.
Currently, most applications simply integrate superior nanotech materials into existing products. Carbon allotropes are used to supply gecko tape. Antibacterial nano-silver is utilized in clothing, food packaging, disinfectants and household appliances. Nano-sized cerium oxide is employed as a fuel catalyst. Increasingly sophisticated products are appearing on the rate of 2-four every week.
This month, we will put money into 33 nanotech companies. Just about all are pre-IPO privately held startups. And we’ll do it in a single step while retaining complete liquidity.
In the method, I’ll describe how one company is altering the DNA of viruses to attack cancers. I’ll also discuss an organization that gets oils from algae. Another company that we will be adding to our portfolio is the leading contender within the race to make your current computer as obsolete as an abacus.
It’s Time to Get into the VC Business
One of the best frustrations about this job is discovering fantastic startups that i will not add to the portfolio. I’ve written at length a couple of few of those pre-IPO companies with enormous, nearly inevitable returns. There are various more, if truth be told, that i have never mentioned. For this reason, i actually envy venture capitalists. For your time, i have been fantasizing a couple of breakthrough technology venture capital fund. This is not quite that, but it’s close.
The attractions of the VC (venture capital) business are obvious. One is just the power to move where equity investors cannot. It irks me that VCs get to purchase into obviously transformational companies once we can’t. The alternative reason is the velocity of return enjoyed by VCs is sometimes a lot higher than the stock market’s. i truly want you to get in at the high yields earned by angel and venture capitalists.
This is why I’m so pleased to have come upon our newest addition to the Breakthrough Technology Alert portfolio. Buying stock on this company permits you to take part in the various most enjoyable and promising nanotech startups in existence – on better than VC terms.
This company acts as one of those VC mutual fund, investing only in privately held early-stage breakthrough technologies. Moreover, your participation within the VC market remains liquid since you can sell the fund at any time. That’s a privilege that ordinary venture capitalists haven’t got.
Not only does the VC fund take positions in important startups, it’s actively engaged, bringing its expertise to and dealing side by side with the management of its portfolio companies. With its broad knowledge of the nanotech industry, the fund may also help portfolio companies with general strategic and operational problems, in addition to business and intellectual property strategy. It helps with executive recruiting, fundraising and compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
Perhaps most significantly, it’s within the position to construct collaborations with strategic partners.
In the method of vetting this company, I spoke at length with the company’s CEO. i used to be pleased, incidentally, to listen to he had enjoyed reading a number of my past problems with Breakthrough Technology Alert.
He took the time to elucidate the VC fund’s investment philosophy to my associate Ray Blanco and me. In accordance with this CEO, the present team has grown from four to 11 members since 2002. Five have extensive VC experiences. Additionally, team members have expertise in solid-state physicists, biochemistry and other technologies that intersect and converge with nanotechnology.
This team constantly monitors the area of nanotech. Additionally, it maintains contact with nanotech scientists in academia, where much cutting-edge research is going on. While academic research is sometimes too early a stage for investors, these relationships allow the fund to spot important spinoffs as they occur.
We know that the long-term promise of nanotech is world changing. The immediate challenge for nanotech investors is finding companies within the commercialization stage. As I’ve explained, we at Breakthrough Technology Alert don’t mind entering into a little bit early, since the eventual returns may be so high. Investors do, however, need to know that their portfolios will maintain and increase in value while anticipating those eventual huge returns. Everyone at this unique venture capital fund clearly understands this need for liquidity.
The Only Publicly Traded Liquid Nanotech VC Firm
To my knowledge, this investment is the best truly liquid nanotech venture capital company available to stock buyers. Diversification is on the heart of its investment philosophy. It generally doesn’t put greater than 5% of its gross assets in any single holding.
It also maintains large cash reserves as a method of counterbalancing the inherent risk of investing in young nanotech businesses that aren’t yet profitable. As its CEO says, the fund offers a “diversified strategy to play the emergence of nanotechnology – when lots of the companies are still private – in a public vehicle.”
Several of its holdings are, however, already earning significant revenues. Companies inside the portfolio generated $242 million in revenue for 2008, a 22% increase over 2007. Other companies are heading in the right direction to becoming revenue producers or to seriously increase revenues.
Since I recommended this unique venture capital fund to my readers last week, we’re already closing in on double-digit gains. But that is not the primary time we’ve stumbled across a transformational company that’s making good on promises to investors…
Something happened last month that I predicted way back. Big Pharm initiated a collaboration with one of the most stem cell companies I recommended to my Breakthrough Technology Alert readers. Specifically, Geron Corp. (NASDAQ: GERN) announced a partnership with GE Healthcare.
The deal is to develop and sell drug-discovery technologies derived from two stem cell lines approved by the Bush administration. The stock rose over 10%, adding about $70 million to Geron’s capitalization.
I don’t write this to crow about being right. I write this since it is critically important which you keep in mind that here is just the top of the iceberg. For anybody knowledgeable about the style pharma interacts with disruptive startups, it was inevitable. New products from Big Pharma have slowed to a trickle lately. The old platforms have largely played out. Slowly, recognition is dawning at the world’s medical giants that it is time to spend money on essentially the mostsome of the most disruptive technology the realm has ever seen — stem cell technologies.
Let’s examine the results.
Pharm is a lumbering behemoth. It might probably take years for the industry to switch focus, however it spews cash wherever it turns. The Geron deal is just the primary, so let’s assume what’s next.
Geron has had years to cultivate its Big Pharm contacts, but Geron’s founder, Dr. Michael West, was busy creating and acquiring his own stem cell lines. His inventory, accordingly, dwarfs Geron’s.
He has, in reality, the various stem cell lines approved by the Obama administration’s new funding guidelines. They comprise, remarkably, greater than 50% of all known eSC lines. Finally count, he had over 200 lines, and 88 had important genetic diseases.
These cell lines, incidentally, were acquired from genetic screeners who help parents who carry genetic diseases assure that they don’t pass them onto their children. They include cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, muscular dystrophy and breast cancer.
Ironically, these cell lines hold the promise of manufacturing treatments for birth defects that currently motivate a major percentage of abortions. This implies, obviously, that the utilization of those cells may produce cures that reduce abortion rates.
The story would not end there. West’s ACTCellerate platform is producing the tools for potentiating stem cells into different cell types. Currently, West knows the way to turn stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells produced from adult cells, into greater than 140 cell types. Recently, as an example, he announced the flexibility to program cells to fix cartilage and connective tissues.
Therefore, the important variety of cell lines that he can produce is in far more than 200 eSC lines times 140 SC types, that is over 28,000 cell types. If just a fraction of those cell types have drug discovery potential, West will do rather well, indeed.
And so will his investors… Stay tuned to the Penny Sleuth to get a lead on emergent technologies like these as they happen.
Yours for transformational profits,
Patrick Cox