The publicly traded Innovus Pharma markets a wide variety of supplements and OTC products. Supplement offerings include omega-3 supplements, cognitive health products, sleep aids, sexual health products. The company’s line of products also extends to OTC pain relief remedies and medical devices such as blood glucose meters.
New funding, new online platform
The company announced last week that it had secured $3.17 million in additional funding via a private placement with a “healthcare-dedicated institutional investor.” The placement consisted of the issuing of shares and warrants. The company’s stock has bumped along in the penny range on the OTC market for more than four years, trading at slightly less than 7 cents a share recently.
The company also recently purchased an online supplement sales platform, supplementhunt.com, from its Canadian owner. The terms of the all cash transaction were not disclosed, but the company said in a statement that the platform has 70,000 plus dedicated users and had generated $1.2 million in sales in the previous 12 months. In a statement to investors, the company said the site was expected to add $2 million in sales to Innovus’ top line revenue in 2019.
“We are very pleased with the growth that SupplementHunt.com has seen, and we believe that the revenue that it has achieved will increase our overall revenue in 2019 and beyond, and will be an ideal platform for us to increase our portfolio of products we sell through our ecommerce businesses, as well as help us to be able to diversify our marketing and sales channels,” said Innovus Pharma CEO Bassam Damaj, PhD.
The company has a strategy of actively pursuing drugs that have recently changed to OTC status or are expected to. But it is also actively developing new dietary supplements, one of which is called Musclin.
Muscle recovery supplement development
Musclin is a products that features thymol, which is an active constituent derived from thyme oil, and Sabinsa’s bioavailability enhancer BioPerine, a pepper extract. The supplement is aimed at supporting muscle mass, muscle recovery time and boosting endurance among adults. Innovus claims it has filed a patent application on the product.
The company says it is recruiting 20 participants for an open label trial on the supplement, with results expected in the first half of 2019. At least one previous study conducted in mice and published in 2016 supports the notion that thymol might be useful in this regard. In that study, the mice were dosed with cardiotoxin, which is a common mode of inducing muscle damage in this animal model.
The authors of the 2016 paper, which was done at a university in Brazil, wrote that their study “suggests that thymol ameliorates inflammatory response and accelerates regeneration in cardiotoxin-induced muscle injury.”
“As a result of its unique mechanism of action on muscle fibers, we believe Musclin is one of the few products targeting the muscle fibers specifically and not the whole body protein synthesis pathways. We are hoping results from this study and potentially others to come will help to support individuals who want to maintain optimal muscle health as they age or suffer from muscle weaknesses,” Damaj said.
Interested in Sports Nutrition?
The inaugural NutraIngredients-USA Sports Nutrition Summit, in association with the International Society of Sports Nutrition, will bring together leading scientists, brands and retailers, market analysts, and innovators in a unique, market-leading face-to-face event.
The key themes of this event include:
- The “size of the prize”
- The power and importance of social media
- Positioning and differentiation
- Sports nutrition and the military - product use survey data and enhancing the performance of Warfighters
- The State of the Science: Sports, fitness and exercise Nutrition
- Sports Nutrition products and Elite Athletes
- Alphabet soup: Everything brands need to know about GMPs, NDIs, AERs, DASCA, SARMs…
- Bacterial boosts – The microbiome and sports
- Personalization and the digital revolution
- Nootropics & sports nutrition
