Philab seeks to raise P2B for rollout of new product

Biotech firm Philab Industries Inc. plans to raise about P2 billion from the local stock market next year to roll out in domestic and overseas markets self-diagnostic kits that will allow households to conduct screen tests for mosquito-carried diseases like dengue, malaria, chukungunya and zika virus.

Philab—which will use Alterra Capital Partners Inc. as its backdoor-listing vehicle—also plans to set up a genomics laboratory to help people determine complete DNA sequences and perform genetic mapping to help understand those diseases.

In an interview with Inquirer last week, Philab president Hector Thomas Navasero said Philab—one of the country’s foremost providers of laboratory equipment and the oldest business institution servicing the fields of medical and scientific research—derived 80 percent of its business from the education sector. The company serves the Department of Education (DepEd) as well as various universities and research centers by providing science teaching kits. Projected revenue collection from DepEd alone is seen at about P2.4 billion by next year, he said.

What’s more exciting for Navasero is Philab’s “lab-it” or laboratory instant testing for the healthcare segments. Over a million kits have been sold to the Department of Health (DOH). Its self-diagnostic kits—which allow diagnostics using painless blood extraction and provide immediate results just like a pregnancy testing kit—will be made available in drug stores.

Philab expects to generate about P1 billion in revenue from the rollout of dengue diagnostic kits by 2017 or 2018.  The company will also have kits to test for malaria, zika and other mosquito-carried diseases.

“This basically fills in a blank between us and the doctor. What if we’re able to test ourselves personally so we know when to see a doctor or how often to see a doctor?” Navasero said.

“What we measure is fever or symptom of fevers.  Each child has 10 to 20 fevers a year. That’s our market size. We use science to better care for ourselves,” he said.

For large-volume acquisitions such as by the DOH, Philab sells the diagnostic kits at P88.

For the consumer market, it is looking at P150 to P300 selling price per kit.  Philab is also considering setting up vending machines in key gateways like airports, to cater to travelers who suspect they may have been infected by diseases from abroad.

“We’ve entered into a market where not too many players are in. Self-testing is new. We basically have the ability to sell elsewhere in the world.  By going public, we will have the resources to expand globally, to take our product born here in the Philippines across Asia, across the world,” Navasero said.

With the rollouts of testing kits, Philab’s business mix is seen to equalize to a 50-50 percent split between education and healthcare by 2017 and 2018.

On genomics, Navasero said his group had been involved with genomics in the last four years, being one of the pioneers in the country, such as in doing research on breast cancer.  With a vast pool of scientists who are underutilized, Navasero believes that the Philippines could be competitive in this space.

“We feel that genomics will one day overtake our revenues from education. We want to provide information to each and every human in the world so they know how to care for themselves, so they live ‘in the know.’ Then we know how to eat, how to exercise, how to care for ourselves, if we know what diseases have high potential in our DNA, with that information, we can live a longer, better life,” Navasero said.

The genomics business requires a big investment in getting state-of-the-art sequencing machines.