 Welcome back to Investor and Tell. I'm Peter Clossey, here today to talk about what seems almost illogical, but using a graphene-based solution to beat bacteria and viruses. We're here with Zen Graphene Solutions. Greg Fenton and Francis Dubey, welcome to the show. Morning. Thank you very much for having us. So I read the press release about 14 times and I'm still astonished by it. Could you take us through the press release and what you think it means? Sure. So yeah, we've been working with this material for a few months now. We actually patented this a version of this early in September after work throughout the summer, trying to come up with a virus-side coating that we would apply to masks and filter materials for the HVAC sensor. Okay, but how do you even come up with that idea in the first place? Hey, let's get graphene and we'll use it to fight a virus. Well, you know, it's the benefit of having a good team and a lot of people that can think outside the box. How do we use this special material to fight a pandemic? And you know, we fired up our team and got some ideas going and one thing led to another and all of a sudden we're in Mount Sinai and doing some testing that surprised us all to be honest with you. That's it's amazing. Greg? We were actually forced to shut down most of our research and development when the pandemic hit, but fortunate for us we had just opened up our lab in Guelph, Ontario and we decided when we started talking to our research partners and they said that they were being shut out of their labs, Francis and I got together and said, well, is there anything that we can do in our facility in Guelph with our limited resources to see if we can help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic? And that's when we started bringing in our science team and some of our existing research group to see just kick around ideas. And that's when they started talking about putting various agents on the surface of graphene. Graphene has a very, very large surface area and we thought maybe there's an opportunity for us to put an antiviral active ingredient on the surface of graphene and that could be potentially turned into a coating that could fight the the COVID-19 virus. Right and that's because when you dial down into graphene it looks like the coastline of Finland with all the fjords. There's a lot of surface area there for something to adhere to. Correct and there's different ways to functionalize the surface of graphene and we've been working with numerous other products and after collaboration with our research team it was determined that we might be able to utilize, you know, there's already oxygen on the surface of graphene oxide but we decided to look at putting silver on it as well because silver has been known for centuries to be very effective against various microbes. So we started that process and lo and behold we by the the end of the summer we had to optimize the solution and come up with something that was incredibly effective. So what does it mean? What does it mean? Well it means that we have developed a product and we continue our testing and that's, you know, a big part of what we released yesterday. After we received the initial testing against the COVID-19 virus the SARS-CoV-2 virus we said we know now that this is effective against this pathogen. We were pretty confident that it was going to be effective against other pathogens as well but obviously we needed to prove that up. So we immediately engaged with a couple of different testing facilities one being McMaster and the other being Mount Sinai to test it against bacteria and fungi and that was where the results that we released yesterday that it was not only was it effective against these pathogens but what was I think really surprising and most surprising to us and even the chief microbiologist that did the work was the incredibly small amount of material required to be effective against the bacteria basically stopping the growth and killing the bacteria. It's literally micro amounts and because it's so small that has significant implications to be brought into the the medical field as treatments for disease. Right so you could even think of your kitchen you could somehow interweave the graphene into the kitchen countertop and then you're providing similar protection against bacteria against MNL against food food substances. Correct this is and yeah you're absolutely bang on the the versatility of this product is way beyond even our own wildest expectations not only the the range of pathogens that it's effective against but how it can be deployed and utilized it's gone from us just looking at it as a coating we initially did this as a as a coating for personal protective equipment but now we're actually talking about bringing it into the human body as a treatment against disease and this just comes back to graphene being this wonder material it's carbon at its base which is inert and you know it's just it truly is a wonder material it's going to be revolutionary going forward here so graphene is basically a diamond that didn't grow up and you're absolutely correct a very flat diamond and thank goodness it didn't fantastic guys so what's the next step so we we've already begun the process of collaborating with I guess the components of a the optimal solution or the end solution which would be the delivery into humans so we've already believe it or not started to receive outreach from the medical industry with respect to this and it's been less than 24 hours since we had our press release but we're already getting reach out we need to collaborate we need to do initially we've we're doing cytotoxicity testing which is basically testing on lab animals to make sure that it's safe when taken internally once we have that testing completed which should be in in january at some point then our hope would be that we could move to sorry in january that seems like an accelerated schedule usually don't these things usually take months and years well that's that's a great point given the early promise that we saw with this we actually started cytotoxicity testing back in october so we're already well into that process we already have received some preliminary results that we haven't disclosed publicly so we we won't comment on those right now but we should have the full spectrum of testing in january and based on that we anticipate being able to move hopefully to human trials at some point some point next year so we are going to look for a pharma partner or partners to help us in that process we are not we are not doctors we we don't know what we don't know and we're going to work with the groups to help us get it there but we do what we do know is that we got we have a a compound that's incredibly unique and promising and i guess you'll need health canada approvals if you go to the state you'll need fd approval and there's there's still a process to go through but you're on the path we're on that absolutely yeah and when you look at products that are out there right now you know something that's antibiotic antiviral and antifungal all in one that you know could be used as a therapeutic it doesn't exist right now right fungus funguses and virals are very tough to kill to deal with so lots of antibiotics but even in the antibiotic range we're starting to see a lot of and this is not new but it's getting worse uh drug resistance right these superbugs are getting worse and worse hospitals are having a big issue with that stuff so you know this is a potentially brand new class of antibiotics right so uh these bugs that have the develop resistance wouldn't have resistance to this because this is something completely new so we might have something there that could be a real holy grail for the hospitals dealing with you know all these superbugs well i'm looking forward to your next press release can we saddle up again when it comes out and catch up would love to very very interesting work congratulations guys you're making a difference in the world so thank you greg fenton francis du baix zen graphing solutions i'm peter clausie signing off from investor intel