Beating The Dow Jones Newswire To A Fascinating Story By A Week…

Posted by Timothy Sykes on Sat 10th of Oct, 2009 01:45:42 PM

Last night an article on Nutra Pharma Corp. (NPHC) entitled “Nutra Pharma’s New Pain Remedy Might Bite Investors” by Carol S. Remond, an award-winning columnist who won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2005 for best news service content with “Exposing Small-Cap fraud,” a series of articles that described how three small companies unscrupulously pumped up their stocks, which she wrote for the Dow Jones Newswire (a subscription service hence me linking to a reposting on a Yahoo! message board full of degenerate penny stocker traders, naive suckers and sure-to-be-going-to-hell-for-spreading-so-much-misinformaton stock promoters) (coincidentally the same subscription service that compared my bookAn American Hedge Fund” to “the trader in Edwin LeFevre’s classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.”,was published, just 8 days after my 3 exposes on NPHC:

My September 30th post describing why I short sold based on NPHC’s financial woes

October 1st, my article on NPHC’s executives tied to FTC rebukes and old embezzlement charges

And how TIMalert subscribers and I made $6,000+ thanks to my correct call with the stock dropping 50%+ within a few days of my linking to these obvious SEC filings and research

Well now I’m short 5,000 shares again, just a small position since they’re launching their cobra-venom pain killer (seriously) next week so I didn’t want to chance a big squeeze, but Carol, who is an award winning fraud buster, wrote a nice intro below…a little late but better late than never.

You will find award winning journalists and the SEC trailing TIMalert subscribers and me on these stocks because their jobs are a whole lot more complicated than discovering and exposing smallcap pump & dumps, this isn’t just my job, it’s my life.

Advantage Sykes. Advantage PennyStocking DVD students. Advantage TIMalert subscribers.

Enjoy Carol’s intro research piece, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a followup since this company has soooo many red flags…TIMalert subscribers will know tomorrow what my plans and analysis on NPHC is for next week:

Nutra Pharma’s New Pain Remedy Might Bite Investors

Nutra Pharma Corp (NPHC) is betting that people suffering from chronic pain
will use its brand new homeopathic remedy Cobroxin, a preparation made with
cobra venom.

But snake venom aside, there are a few reasons investors might want to
exercise caution.

For starters, Nutra Pharma doesn’t exactly have a healthy balance sheet.
According to its last quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the company at the end of June had no cash, total assets of just
$39,000 and about $3.1 million in liabilities. Earlier this week, Nutra Pharma
said it sold almost 35 million shares at 8 cents during the month of
September. That brings its shares outstanding to about 255 million which, at a
current price of 71 cents, gives this company a healthy market capitalization
of about $181 million.

Then there is the fact that the company hasn’t completed any testing of its
new pain killer on humans, a point that might have some would-be-users think
twice before trying Cobroxin.

Aside from press releases by Nutra Pharma and Xenacare Holdings Inc. (XCHO),
the company licensed to market and distribute the pain remedy, and a Web site
set up by Nutra Pharma, there is little information about Cobroxin. Neither
Nutra Pharma, nor Xenacare mentioned Cobroxin in press releases or filings
with the SEC before August 2009. Xenacare said Aug. 17 that “its” pain
reliever Cobroxin had won a best new product award. On Aug. 20, Nutra Pharma
announced the launch of an over-the-counter pain reliever called Cobroxin. And
then in an Aug. 26 press release, Nutra Pharma said it had licensed Xenacare
to market the product in the U.S.

According to its most recent quarterly report, Xenacare at the end of June
had no cash, about $1 million in assets, $3 million in liabilities and almost
$8 million in accumulated deficit.

Xenacare said in a filing earlier this week that it raised $500,000. That
money might come handy to fund the $550,000 marketing campaign of Cobroxin it
announced in early September.

The flurry of August press releases was quite beneficial to Nutra Pharma’s
stock. Shares, which had been trading under a nickel, jumped to a high of 99
cents on Sept. 29. Trading volume also spiked, with a record 7 million shares
changing hands on Oct 2.

Nutra Pharma Chief Executive Officer Rik Deitsch attributed the price and
volume spikes to the fact that his company has a lot of followers who believe
in Cobroxin. Deitsch said Cobroxin would be available in retail stores Monday.
The CEO told Dow Jones Newswires that cobra venom had historically been
successfully used as a pain killer and predicted that Cobroxin would boost his
company’s revenues.

Asked about Xenacare’s apparent lack of cash to finance Cobroxin’s marketing
campaign, Deitsch, a Xenacare director, said the company had more than $10
million in available financing from its insiders.

Xenacare CEO Frank Rizzo wasn’t available to comment. SEC filings show that
Nutra Pharma invested in Xenacare in 2004. Deitsch said his company converted
about $175,000 into 85,000 shares of Xenacare, which it still holds.

Deitsch said Nutra Pharma is in the process of completing human clinical
trials in an effort to gather as much information as possible about Cobroxin.
Investors might want to wait for those results before taking the plunge.

(Carol S. Remond, a special writer on the In The Money team, is an award-winning columnist who won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2005 for best news service content with “Exposing Small-Cap fraud,” a series of articles that described how three small companies unscrupulously pumped up their stocks. She can be reached at 303-997-5783 or by e-mail: carol.remond@dowjones.com)

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  • ALiVE_INVESTS
    nice call Tim
  • Here's some more fodder for future posts Tim. It is simply a listing of some of their completely ridiculous PRs that amounted to NOTHING from 2004-2007 (all while going from a crappy quarter stock to a crappy sub-penny stock). I guess people started figuring out it was all smoke and mirrors. Here we go:

    Nutra Pharma Reports ReceptoPharm's Completion of a Critical First Step in Their Lead Drug's Production

    Nutra Pharma Hires Outside Specialists to Bring Infectech's Technology to Market

    Nutra Pharma Reports ReceptoPharm Assays Prove That Experimental HIV Drug May Be Widely Available after Approval

    Nutra Pharma Engages Research Group to Validate Portage BioMed Technology

    Nutra Pharma Reports Preclinical Results of RPI-78M in Multiple Sclerosis to Be Presented at Scientific Meeting

    Nutra Pharma Announces Svizera Labs to Supply Designer Diagnostics' Test Kits to the World Health Organization

    The Wall Street Transcript Publishes Interview With Nutra Pharma CEO Rik J. Deitsch (Yup, they do this every couple years -- must have an "in" there)

    Nutra Pharma Announces Approval to Start Late Phase II Human Trials in England

    The JALMA Institute Signs Purchase Agreement for Nutra Pharma's NTM Test Kits
  • And one more thing. In this 2006 article:

    http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/busine...

    It seems their were using viper venom to cure MS and HIV. Really, WTF? Also interesting is the note that they need only 1kg of venom to produce 1 million doses. This seems eerily similar to recent statements about them have the materials to create millions of Cobroxin units -- what they might really be saying is that they have a kilo of cobra venom and hardly any actual units whatsoever (since I highly doubt that anyone with any sense would pre-manufacture all this at a cost of several million -- especially with no sales and no retailers named yet).
  • Bartek
    Trying to hold on...

    NPC Blog
    Nutra Pharma Bites Back – A Response to the Dow Jones Newswires

    Posted on Oct 12th, 2009 by Rik J. Deitsch

    On Friday, an article came out from Dow Jones Newswires that discussed Nutra Pharma and our launch of Cobroxin. While the article was factually correct and well written, the author left out critical pieces of information that failed to tell the entire story about Nutra Pharma.

    While at first glance, our balance sheet looks soft. We have several million dollars in liabilities and our latest quarterly from the SEC reported little cash in-hand. But at closer inspection, one would realize that over the years, I have funded the company over $3 million out of my own pocket to continue our drug development work on Multiple Sclerosis (MS), pain, HIV/AIDS, and Adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN). Because of my strong belief in our pipeline, I chose to provide this financing as a loan to the company, instead of diluting shareholders. This financing now makes up the majority of the $3.1 million liability.

    Today, the company is as strong as ever. Not only are we in the process of launching our first product in the United States, but we are also much stronger financially with over $2.5 million in cash that we plan to use to finance the manufacturing of Cobroxin and additional clinical studies for our other drug indications.

    As we move forward with the launch of Cobroxin this week, it is important that our customers and shareholders understand the history of the product and its clinical profile. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in our branded pain reliever, Cobroxin, is Asian cobra venom. We have been studying cobra venom for the past 10 years at our drug discovery subsidiary, ReceptoPharm under the supervision of Dr. Paul Reid. Dr. Reid acts as the CEO of ReceptoPharm and is one of the world’s foremost experts on cobra venom. He first started studying it when he was at the United States Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, under a grant from the National Research Council in Washington, D.C.

    Cobra venom dates further back than Dr. Reid’s original work in the early 1990s. It has been used in the U.S. for over 75 years and has a well understood clinical application. There are 46 human clinical trials dating back to the 1930s and 20 pre-clinical studies using cobra venom to treat pain, including some of the most recent work being completed by Dr. Paul Reid from ReceptoPharm and Dr. Zheng-Hong Qin, who divides his time between Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Soochow University in Suzhou, China.

    Unfortunately, a point of confusion in the recent article was that it stated that Nutra Pharma is in the process of completing human clinical trials in an effort to gather as much information as possible about Cobroxin. In fact, we are planning to conduct an additional trial for Nyloxin Rx, our prescription pain reliever, to compare its efficacy to other prescription pain medicines. We believe that the results of this comparison study could provide us with excellent evidence showing that Nyloxin Rx should be the preferred method of treatment for severe (Stage 3) chronic pain. Additional details will be released as we move into the launch of Nyloxin Rx.

    While we would like to claim Cobroxin as a new product, it is not. Cobra venom has been used as a therapeutic agent in China for thousands of years for a variety of different purposes. Additionally, here in the United States, cobra venom is a U.S. monographed drug under the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia (HPUS) and was used as a pain killer by the United States government during World War II.

    As cortisone became popular and other pain killers became accessible in the United States, people stopped using cobra venom primarily because it lacked standardization. 50 years ago, the technology to measure the amount or type of peptides and whether there was bacterial or fungal contamination did not exist. Additionally, there were no tools available to properly clean, sterilize and standardize the solution, so patients would end up with ineffective and bad batches. Today, however, with our understanding of cobra venom peptides and the technology that we have available, we can tell you exactly what is in every batch and verify that it is sterile, clean and that it is going to be effective. Our understanding of this product and the technology we have available to us is why I believe cobra venom will once again become a staple for treating pain.

    A critical part of the launch of Cobroxin is our licensing partnership with XenaCare Holdings. What drew us to XenaCare was not only the company’s commitment to a several million dollar roll-out, but also its relationship with a broker network that is considered among the leaders in the industry with a history for launching successful products, several of which now have over a billion dollars in sales. While we are confident that XenaCare is fully-capable of completing a successful launch of Cobroxin by utilizing its available financial and human capital, our agreement, as would any out-licensing agreement, requires XenaCare to meet certain minimum performance requirements.

    If you would like to learn more about the science behind Cobroxin, I invite you to click here to listen to a webinar I hosted last month discussing the product. I believe this will help clarify the science behind the Cobroxin and why cobra venom is effective for treating Stage 2 chronic pain.

    In summary, I would like to reiterate how excited we are about Nutra Pharma and the blockbuster potential of our drug discovery platform. As we move forward on all of our initiatives and transition into a revenue producing company, I would like to invite you to reach out directly to our investor relations department at (877) 895-5647 or by email at ir@nutrapharma.com with any questions you have about the Company. We pride ourselves on remaining as transparent as possible to our shareholders and will continue with this effort as we complete the launch of Cobroxin and the continued develop of our drug pipeline.
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Date Stock Buy Sell Net
Nov 19 AENY $2.80 $3.02 $1148
Nov 18 NLST $4.16 $4.40 $947
Nov 18 IMGG $1.42 $1.64 $2094
Nov 17 NLST $5.04 $5.59 $2195
Nov 13 VRMLQ $21.50 $22.97 $2901
Nov 11 EONC $2.61 $2.80 $687
Nov 10 EONC $2.74 $3.36 $9784
Nov 6 QXM $4.31 $4.80 $1936
Nov 4 COT $8.66 $8.88 $642
Nov 4 QXM $4.61 $4.89 $822
Oct 30 DDRX $25.70 $26.53 $812
Oct 29 CTDC $4.00 $4.42 $781
Oct 26 AWSL $3.24 $4.10 $2516
Oct 23 RODM $5.27 $5.23 $301
Oct 22 AMLM $2.69 $2.97 $820
Oct 22 USEG $6.12 $6.09 $85
Oct 20 CBOU $8.93 $9.06 $243
Oct 16 VRMLQ $16.79 $18.65 $2773
Oct 13 YONG $11.05 $11.66 $1202
Oct 13 NPHC $0.59 $0.71 $583
Oct 12 IMGG $0.60 $0.70 $682
Oct 9 ZAGG $5.50 $6.10 $2380
Oct 7 GVBP $0.03 $0.27 $702
Oct 1 NPHC $0.70 $0.85 $1482

Total: $98,094 (681%)