Rob Davidson is the CEO of Cure Pharmaceutical. Rob saw kids in Japan with candy strips on clear film and had an aha moment. “Why can’t we deliver medications on an oral thin film?”
70% of Americans are on prescription medication and 75% of patients have trouble swallowing. So, delivery of medications on a thin film could radically change drug delivery and avoid side effects like GI issues and irritation.
On this episode of Talk PR, Davidson discusses his vision for the future of Cure and the personalization of health and wellness.
TRANSCRIPT
Tracy Williams: Rob Davidson is the CEO of Cure Pharmaceuticals, whose world headquarters is right up the road in Ventura, Oxnard, and there’s lots of Life Sciences and healthcare out there, but Rob’s company has something that every company would like to have, and that’s a totally unique market. Tell me what that means, and how can I get one?
Rob Davidson: What we really do at Cure Pharmaceutical is we develop better ways to deliver medications to patients, more effectively, more efficacious. And with the ability to really get into the distribution channels that are difficult to reach, we have lightweight delivery systems called thin film technology, oral thin films, if you’re familiar with Listerine strips. It looks a little bit like that, but there’s a lot of technology behind it. It allows us to deliver medications through the sublingual cavity or through the GI effectively, lightweight shipping, no cold chain distribution necessary. So, if you imagine emerging markets that have difficulty with cold chain distribution as we saw with COVID vaccines, we can eliminate that, and we can eliminate, potentially, the need for some injectables by utilizing our technology. So, it is unique in that approach. We don’t develop molecules. We just make the molecule more effective by how we deliver it.
Tracy Williams: I was fortunate to hear the story of where this idea hit you. I know it happened in Asia.
Rob Davidson: It did. It actually did. The original idea of utilizing thin film as a delivery technology did come out of Japan, believe it or not. I think I was traveling. I saw the film, being utilized for breath freshening. Right before Listerine came out, Japan was the birthplace of thin film for flavoring foods. Believe it or not, they put it on their foods, and they would use flavors and spices in the film. You’d microwave it, it would heat up and infuse into the food. So, I looked at that and I said, “Well, that maybe a good idea for medications.” Why not look at that? Because obviously it’s a flavored system. It’s lightweight, portable. You don’t have to swallow it like pills. A lot of people have difficulty swallowing pills. When you look at the pediatric population and geriatric population and people with neurological issues, they can’t swallow pills. So, we decided to come out with an active. Tried our first active. We did a benzo, keen oral, thin film. We were the first company in the world to put a drug active on a film. We did chloroseptic, if you remember that older brand chloroseptic, we did that for both the pediatric patient population and the geriatric patient population as the first product utilizing thin film, but basically getting into a become a platform technology really had to do with Africa. I was traveling in Africa do some volunteer work there. And you know, you see a lot of malaria cases, especially pediatric. And I was talking to some of the doctors and clinicians there, and they were given these two powders, like big cans of powder, and they had to mix it in water to these actives in water and then give it to the patient. But they had to give it to the patient really quick, because the actives interacted in a bad way. But that was one problem, so you had to take it and do it really quick. The other problem is you couldn’t find clean drinking water. You can find a can of Coke or Pepsi more effectively than you could find pure water in some of these areas in Africa. So, they were mixing it in what they could find, soda, juices, things like that. And again, the actors were very sensitive, so they’re killing the active and the patient’s not getting better, and kids are losing their lives. You know, taking medications the way you’re delivering is not effective, also the weight and logistics of powders are a lot different. We decided to develop a platform technology to handle some of these really difficult medications, both distribution wise as well as delivery wise, and really protecting the actives from degrading and delivering it more effectively. So that was kind of the, if you will, the launch pad for our OTF technology.
Tracy Williams: It’s such a breakthrough. I mean, what a breakthrough opportunity. And nobody had really done it up until that point, except for delivering flavor, right?
Rob Davidson: Exactly, just freshman, right? That was it. Because there’s a lot of technology that you have to employ into the product to really protect the actives to facilitate delivery into the body more effectively. It’s not just putting it on top of a film. It’s actually embedded in the film itself and protected by stabilizers and permeation enhancers. And so lots of things you do to make it work.
Tracy Williams: You have cure strips, for pharmaceuticals, for nutraceuticals, for wellness; what guides the strategy and the product pipeline?
Rob Davidson: That’s a great question. So need – that’s really what guides us. I’ll give you an example. We work with a hospital called Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. They came to us and they said, “we need vitamin D. Our cancer patients, bone marrow transplantation patients, we can’t get their vitamin D levels up, and it’s a problem for us,” because vitamin D is essential to increasing your immune efficiencies. It helps to build T cells and NK cells, all the cells you need for your immune system to be effective. They tried everything. They tried liquids. They tried, gavage, drinks, foods, putting it in feeding tubes. They couldn’t get their vitamin D levels up. It was crazy. So, they came to us, and our team developed a vitamin D oral thin film that actually will deliver one dose a week, and very effectively, it gets into the blood, into the fat cells. It deposes into the fat cells, and then it leaches out over time. So, your vitamin D is gradually increasing, and you’re getting the vitamin D you need to rebuild the immune system. We did a published study with them. It was very effective. 100% of the patient cohort was able to get the vitamin D levels up to normal and above, and 100% of those patients survived the post op and post treatment, which you know, it’s not the treatment that kills them, it’s actually the lack of immune system and the non sarcomial illnesses from hospitals – the opportunistic infections that are in hospitals going and attacking their bodies and they’d have nothing to fight it with. So, we were very proud of that study is published. We continue to work with them on other projects, but that that’s definitely born out of a need. And now we have a vitamin D product that we sell on the market.
Tracy Williams: So, it’s just that – a standard of care. Shouldn’t we buy those now at the drugstore?
Rob Davidson: We sell it directly into Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. They have access. Their patients have access to buy it online. And we really don’t brand our own products. So if a company comes to us and they need it, they will actually buy it from us and distribute it under their brand. But we are working with pharmaceutical companies with vitamin D. So it’s definitely something that they’re looking at, and there’s a need for in the market.
Tracy Williams: So, are there any other kind of fun products that you’re working on?
Rob Davidson: Yeah, we’re working on some oral vaccines to be able to deliver effective vaccines without injection for especially emerging markets like Hepatitis B, which is so prevalent in Asia, India, Africa. The reason it’s prevalent, first of all, people don’t like needles. We all know that that’s a no brainer. But the second component is what we talked about earlier, the cold chain distribution. Cold Chain distribution is not readily available in emerging markets or third world countries, so we’re able to protect the active, the vaccine, and, hopefully, treat the patient without having to inject and without having cold chain distribution. And we’re doing that for other viruses. We’re doing that even for diabetes. We’re working on a weight loss project. GLP-1 is a big deal right now, peptides, but you have to inject them. So yeah, we have a lot of fun projects.
Tracy Williams: Tell me about the journey from private startup to going public and then taking the company private again, which is something that a lot of companies have experienced. Tell us why and how it’s turned out for you.
Rob Davidson: The original thought process for us going public was obvious, to raise capital and increase market value based on your IP portfolio technology, which did work for a while, and we were able to get funding that way. However, COVID changed things. You probably know that it changes for a lot of people. So COVID, really, and people weren’t working. So, we weren’t able to advance certain things. We did pay our employees, but they weren’t at work. We kept our employees paid, which is not easy. We’re a small pharmaceutical company, but because of that, we really weren’t able to get the capital that we needed to grow the company. So, what we did is we looked for partners to buy us, added a public company, and take it private. And we were very successful in that.
We did that a couple of years ago. I think it’s been two years now, two and a half years somewhere around there, and we’ve actually pivoted the business quite a bit from we have an R and D side of the business, but we also now are really looking at the telemedicine play as well, direct to consumers, direct to patients, personalizing their medications, personalizing health and wellness. Because, you know, one thing COVID taught me is we’re more of a nation of sick care rather than health care. So I really want to be a part of that. And at the forefront of health and wellness more on a preventative side. You know, even like nutraceuticals, it doesn’t always have to be medications the foods you eat. So we’re really pivoted a lot to that side of the business.
Tracy Williams: You know, tariffs are going to be tough on cards, right? We know that today, is it going to be challenging for you? Is there anything in the pharmaceutical industry or for Cure in particular that’s you’re concerned about?
Rob Davidson: It can be absolutely because we do most of our raw materials and APIs from the US, but a lot of the packaging components, the secondary components, plastic, even the cardboards and paper is going to be expensive because there’s tariffs now. So that’s going to increase price. And the reason why we bought them there is because they don’t want to manufacture that. There’s not a lot of manufacturers in the US for that. So you’re limited now in your supply source. Now the price is going to go even higher, so you created a bigger demand for that. It does concern me a bit on the tariffs for that, but you know, we’ll figure out how to pivot on that. If we have to.
Tracy Williams: How has 2025 started out for you? Will 2025 be better or worse for Cure?
Rob Davidson: It’s got to be better, definitely better than COVID. I think from 24 to 25 is going to be great year for us, actually.
Tracy Williams: So thanks for this, and good luck in keeping California in the front ranks of innovation and hope.
Rob Davidson: Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure.
Tracy Williams: It’s been such a pleasure, and we’ve learned a lot today. So thank you so much.
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