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Nick Hodge’s “Blue Light” Cancer Detection Device

Early Advantage teases a "future billion-dollar technology" ... what is it?

Looks like we’ve got another small cap company being touted by Nick Hodge for his Early Advantage service — but now, instead of the “blue blood” company that he’s been touting for a year or so as the potential enabler of a cancer cure, he’s pitching this “blue light” company as the one that will save millions of lives and make millions of bucks by helping people discover cancer sooner.

Certainly an admirable goal, the earlier you detect cancer the better your chances of defeating it… but will it make you any money? Well, for that we first have to figure out which company he’s teasing us about.

And no, we don’t want to shell out $499 just to get the top secret name. We’ll check out the clues instead — and yes, this ad was chock-full of clues and I’m sure you could figure out the stock on your own…. no need, we’re here to help and we’ve already got some answers for you.

Of course, you have to sit through a bit of blather first. Let’s sample a wee bit of Hodge’s pitch to give you a taste of the promise:

“Thanks to this future billion-dollar technology…

Cancer is Now Visible To the Naked Eye

“This simple ‘blue light’ may not only save your life… But also turn a small investment of $5,000 into… More than $1 MILLION.

“… despite the massive technological advances over the past half-century, Western medicine still hasn’t found a cure for cancer.

“So the best way to fight the disease is to detect cancerous cells before they spread.

“That’s where the ‘blue light’ comes in….

“With the ‘blue light’ device, your doctor now can see cancerous cells during a regular check-up… without using any invasive, painful, or expensive procedures.

“It helps your doctor identify cancers at their earliest stages, when they’re still easily treatable and before they spread to other parts of the body.

“That’s why this device is revolutionizing the cancer diagnostics industry.

“Surprisingly, the company behind this breakthrough isn’t a large, global medical company.

“It has a market cap below $50 million. Last year, it only made $3.7 million in sales.

“But, as you’ll see in this presentation, sales are about to jump to $788 million… thanks to this ‘blue light’ technology.

“What does this kind of growth mean for investors like you?

“Well, that’s a jump of 21,200%… enough to turn each $5,000 invested into $1,065,000….

“For just five grand today, you could be a certified millionaire — with change to spare — in a matter of months… not decades.”

OK, so that’s obviously baloney. They’re not going to go from $3.7 million to $788 million in sales in a matter of months, and you’re not going to get a 20X return on this stock this year. That just doesn’t happen.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a worthless company, or that it might not be worth some speculation — we’ll keep an open mind. Just get that “$5,000 into $1,000,000” bit out of your head first, that’ll completely poison any rational thought.

So what’s Nick Hodge talking about?

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He’s teasing a company that sells a scanning device that can help detect cancer — specifically oral cancer, like that which got actor Michael Douglas.

Here are a few more clues from Hodge, if you’re playing along at home:

“Even though this is a tiny company, it’s not the typical biotech stock gamble.

“I’m not talking about a risky drug company that depends on a FDA approval for survival.

“In fact, the FDA and Health Canada have already cleared the ‘blue light’ technology.

“And I’m not talking about a technology that’s built on run-of-the-mill hype either.

“The World Health Organization has already recognized the ‘blue light’ device. And the prestigious Pride Institute has named it ‘Best of Class’ twice.

“The National Institute of Health and the BC Cancer Agency have backed it with $50 million.

“Dozens of clinical studies have shown that the “blue light” device can help doctors detect cancerous cells before they spread to other parts of the body.

“The National Institute of Health, for example, said that this device ‘has proved valuable in the detection of high-risk lesions, in the delineation of surgical margins, and in follow-up after treatment.'”

And then we get to the intriguing part — Hodge says that not only is this a medical device, but that it uses the “razor and blade” model that we investors are so attuned to … that’s what made Gillette such a behemoth, though in modern parlance we might actually refer to it as the “printer and ink” model, with companies subsidizing and heavily promoting a device … and then profiting from the ongoing sale of disposable attachments, refills or accessories that must be used in order for the device to function. It’s a great business model, obviously.

So how does it apply here?

Well, first we have to tell you what the stock is — Hodge gave plenty more clues in his presentation (he always gives plenty of clues in his ads … methinks he likes it that stocks often get a bit of additional surge from the fact that other folks sniff out the answers and buy the stock even if they don’t buy his newsletter), so the Thinkolator had a nice, easy Monday morning in identifying this stock as … LED Medical Diagnostics (LMD.V in Canada, LEDIF on the OTCQX in the US).

LED Medical Diagnostics is, so they themselves say, a “global leader in the development of tissue fluorescence visualization technologies.” They’re trying to develop several different types of scanners and applications that can help to visualize cancers, including skin cancer, but so far they really have one product that they sell to dentists for use in oral cancer screenings.

Oral cancer screening is a real thing — your dentist probably does it at your annual checkup, poking around your mouth for odd lumps and looking to see if anything jumps out as irregular. There are also several technologies used by a few dentists to try to do more intensive detection, but from what I’ve seen in my ten minute survey of the industry the device offered by LED Medical’s subsidiary LED Dental does seem to be one of the least intensive ones.

Their device is called the VELscope VX, here’s how they describe it:

“…the company manufactures the award-winning VELscope® Vx Enhanced Oral Assessment System, the first system in the world to apply tissue fluorescence visualization technology to the oral cavity. The VELscope® Vx is now used to conduct more screenings for oral cancer and other oral diseases than any other adjunctive device.”

The VELscope VX is not new, it’s been around for a couple years and its predecessor, the VELscope, was around for a few years before that. It’s also not the only visual imaging device that’s used to screen for mouth cancer, though the only other ones I’ve seen, like the ViziLite are a bit more intensive or uncomfortable for the patient, requiring a mouth wash or dyes, and not necessarily more effective. Of course, there seems to also be some question as to whether the VELscope is substantially different from the traditional oral exam — not that the VELscope doesn’t work, but that it may not consistently find things that the doctor or dentist wouldn’t also find in mass screenings of low-risk patients (tobacco is an especially strong risk factor for oral cancer and smokers generally get a more intensive visual exam, one assumes, though HPV transmission through oral sex is thought to be a leading cause, particularly among younger people, now that tobacco use has fallen so much).

So that’s probably worth some more research if you’re thinking about investing in this company — it makes a product that has effectively been in use for more than five years, without a dramatic breakthrough in sales. There is a newer version of the product now, the VELscope VX, though I don’t know what the difference is and that product has been out for at least a year or two.

The product is relatively inexpensive, costing the dentist something in the neighborhood of $3,000 from what I can tell, and they’ve broken off their exclusive relationship with their North American distributor so it’s now available from a bunch of the big distribution companies (it is available from a couple of the major dental distributors who I just checked, including Patterson and Henry Schein, but pricing is not particularly public or transparent in this sector — Schein lists it at $3,300, most of the others didn’t give me a price).

The disposable covers, which I assume are a hygienic cap for the end that goes in your mouth, cost less than $2 and probably net the company close to a dollar, so the goal would obviously be to get really high volume usages — if they could get most dentists to offer this to most patients at a cost of $30 or so, they do have some potential to generate revenue growth.

But they haven’t been able to yet. Last year was, in CEO-speak, “challenging.” They saw declining revenue from the prior year, partly but not entirely because they changed their revenue recognition policy and also changed their relationship with their primary distributor, but they have also simply not had big surges of orders. So something is not working.

Is it the product? The marketing? The financial case for dentists, who may or may not be able to get insurance coverage for these tests (some insurers cover it, but it looks like less than half do so far)? Reluctance to change among dentists? Or is the company screwing something up with distribution or pricing? I have no idea. They’ve sold thousands of these devices over the years, but not enough to turn it into a profitable business.

You can see the CEO’s latest letter here, and the September quarterly report here — they have been forced to sell a lot of shares to raise cash to build up their distribution, marketing and R&D, so they sold 17 million shares last Spring and another 15 million after the close of the last quarter, so the share count is now around 73 million shares… and at 50 cents a share, that means the market cap is roughly C$35 million.

Yes, that’s absurdly tiny. There are some warrants, too, but the company is so small that they’re not hugely meaningful. The business is in transition to some degree, but they have apparently had a run rate of somewhere between a million and three million in actual cash burn over the last couple years — I suspect, given the transition to a new CEO and the hiring and the distribution changes that they’re going to run through more cash this year as they try to ramp up marketing and build onto this platform with R&D for more products, but I don’t really know.

The cost of goods in their income statement has run at around 40% for the past couple years, so they can theoretically turn this into a profitable product line… but they had a heavy marketing budget in 2012 and a much lower one in 2013 and it didn’t seem to make any real difference to their bottom line, so I don’t really know what it will take to get revenue growth and profitability.

They should be reporting the new CEO’s first quarter and the full year 2013 results sometime fairly soon, I find the product interesting and I like the business model but clearly something isn’t working — I’ll personally withhold judgement for a while, but I’ll be interested to see what they say in that next quarterly report.

And, as always, let me remind you that this company is teeny. So small that Nick Hodge shouldn’t be using it as a single-stock teaser and building up this level of excitement among his prospective customers… and so small that I shouldn’t even be writing about it to the great legion of Gumshoe readers — any attention at all can drive a nano-cap stock like this crazy, so while I do like to answer your questions about such tiny teased stocks … I feel a little guilty. Sorry. You’re adults, you can go forth, researchify, and share your opinion on LED Medical with a comment below.

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gabgigor
gabgigor
April 12, 2014 1:46 pm

Well after many articles and comments in GS land I finally feel the urge to add my 2 cents. Being a Dental Surgeon for the last 28 years has opened my eyes and ears to a large cross section of people/ patients. Most patients only visit when a problem arises – specifically we don’t see them for routine maintenance 2x per year. A complete head, neck and oral exam is done at initial visit as well as semi annually when they do come. Specifically we are looking for changes in the head, neck and oral cavity. Any changes that are detected are referred to the oral surgeon for evaluation and possible biopsy. For me this VELscope vx would not replace a thorough exam. Many dentists I know like toys, oops instruments ,which have the potential to earn an extra $- for me this falls into that category. For lack of a better analogy, it is like saying a virtual colonoscopy is as good or better than an actual one. Sales are slow because the dental fraternity has not readily accepted this entity into their practice. I wish them all the best with their LED Imaging division !

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vivian lewis
April 12, 2014 1:59 pm

dear Dr Bradshaw, where do you practice dentistry? how can I join your patient rolls? my dentist summons me 2x a year for the vicious Russian blond to scrape my teeth of accumulated crud. every couple of years someone wants to take an X-ray to look for
cavities and I normally refuse because I don’t think I have any. The great panumjon, Dr
Bob, almost never appears and avoids looking into my mouth. if you are anywhere near
57th Street in Manhattan you can have a great impact on standards

Heather
Guest
April 14, 2014 3:41 am

Vitamin b17. Non pattinable. A World Without Cancer. You tube. Edward Griffin

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Dennis
Dennis
April 14, 2014 9:16 pm

I attended a dental school that has an oral diagnosis department that sees patients from a wide multistate area. While in school I worked summers in the Oral Pathology Research Department and got to know the caliber of these pathologists and diagnosticians, and have kept in touch with them until recently, when I’m guessing their liability situation stopped them from communicating about cases electronically. I attended an oral pathology presentation by one of their lead oral pathologists and afterwards went up and asked him about the Velscope and other such heavily marketed techniques to detect specifically oral cancer. His feeling – and this is what he does for a living – was that a detailed and critical patient history, visual and palpation examination was still the gold standard. Unusual findings are then either observed or referred for biopsy, taking into account patient factors, habits and dentist expertise and experience. To make a special light your main screening tool could foster both a false sense of security and likely false positives. For these devices,I feel the price point is very high for what you get, probably because there is no economy of scale. Having investigated these devices at trade shows, there is also an inconvenience factor for the doctor, patient or both. In my experience the average oral cancer, though real, is not very common, even though tobacco and alcohol are serious risk factors. A much more frequent problem I’ve seen is young men who carry a wad of chewing tobacco in their cheeks for most of the day. This is very serious and dangerous. So even though I suspect the technology pipeline may be nurturing some new and better cancer detection devices, I do not yet own any.

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Playfulhair
Member
Playfulhair
April 16, 2014 5:42 pm

I’ve tryed the black light at my Dentists office about 3 yrs ago the first time.
You swish a solution within your mouth and then the Doc puts a wand inside your
Mouth. It made fell better after the test.
Recently had done it again, I didn’t know of anything different in procedure,
Unless it was in the solution. The wand seemed to be the same. And no cancer!

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growacet
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growacet
April 17, 2014 5:20 pm

I had already invested in LMD (LEDIF on the otcbb) before I’d even heard of this outsider club outfit…since the promo on LMD came out I signed up, and every day I’m getting an email directing me to their promo piece about turning 5K into $1 million. Wiki says they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but despite all the hype the PPS is flat on heavy volume which lead me to suspect dumping on the hype.

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Stella
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Stella
April 22, 2014 11:31 pm

I am very very thankful for your detailed report. Keep up the good work.

Stella
Guest
Stella
April 22, 2014 11:37 pm

Thank you very much for this detailed report. It has saved struggling investors lots of money. Clearly this device could make investors some money when it becomes more wildly used etc, But the hype to extort money from people is not right And you are really appreciated for your detailed report. Investors should have the freedom to make an intelligent/ knowledgeable decision. Thanks again.

Pendragon Tim Chng
Guest
Pendragon Tim Chng
April 29, 2014 5:54 am

Hi Travis, I was curious about Nick Hodge’s “Blue Light” tech stock. You save me just in time. You are doing a great charitable thing here. Keep on the great wrk

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dougj34
dougj34
May 2, 2014 1:12 pm

LED is speculation, not really investment at this point. Breakthroughous have to start somewhere, this one could be a continuation of a breakthrough. Light frequencies have a place in medical advancements, we humans are in the early stages of understanding the value of light therapies and detection properties, I am certain Dr KSS will agree with that. Big Pharma has its place too, it has just gotten too big for its britches. So let the ranters rant, the gumshoes investigate, and the medical sector state clinical data, it is all good stuff for me to have access to. I am a speculator and live in joyful hope so I grabbed some LEDIF, at $.41 a share there is not much to risk. I also like Nick Hodge just fine, I am a buy and hold type, he has opened a couple nice doors to me and he talks my language.

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polowojo
May 6, 2014 11:59 am

PRINTING FOUL.
For awhile, you had a print now button at the end of your personal writeup.
using it, i would get a clear print.
The button is no longer there. Printing out a commentary now causes overprint from the right hand margin stuff. Is there a cure for THIS cancer? phil

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David Steele
Guest
June 2, 2014 3:39 pm

Unsure how I stumbled across this site many months ago but I love it…. I trade US stocks from the UK and get so much junk mail, I used to challenge myself to find the company they are touting but reading your assessment is so much more fun

Thanks from rainy England

vivian lewis
June 2, 2014 5:15 pm

After reading this set of replies I can guess how Bo O., my Swedish friend who developed head and neck cancer, probably increased his risk: snuff, snuss, something Swedes like to pack into their cheeks while they go about their lives in worse weather than even England has.
It might have helped him had he gotten an LED light played on his mouth when he went to the dentist in Portugal, where he lived (he was, like many smart Swedes, a tax exile but only late in life.) I now am worried about other forms of non-smoked nicotine delivery systems. If the risk goes up with e-cigarettes maybe this stock is worth looking at.
As I am a firm believer in medical opinion I wait for KSS to take this question on. Is there an increased risk of oral or head and mouth cancer if you stop smoking tobacco and switch to e-ciggies? thanks in advance.

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DrKSSMDPhD
June 2, 2014 5:21 pm
Reply to  vivian lewis

Vivian: if e-cigarettes are only what the manufacturers say they are, and not spiked with anything else, yes, they are enormously safer. They are supposedly just mechanisms for delivering water vapor with nicotine,

Cigarettes and snuff and snus are two things, two variables: tobacco, which is highly carcinogenic, and nicotine, a substance found in tobacco that is not cancer-causing but is highly habit forming (more so than cocaine). Smoking addiction is not tobacco addiction but nicotine addiction. E cigs disentangle these and provide the nicotine without the cancer-triggers. I encourage patients, if they must smoke, to switchover. Snuff and snus are highly causative of oral cancer, Tobacco is an extreme witch’s brew of carcinogens. and not just when it is burned.

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joe_retail
Guest
joe_retail
June 2, 2014 5:19 pm

Zacks has a $2 target, updated analysis out today.

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vivian lewis
June 2, 2014 5:32 pm

Thanks Dr KSS. I don’t smoke being just old enough to remember that there was evidence that smoking caused cancer when I was of an age to be tempted.
If e-cigarettes work by delivering nicotine without the awfuls does a waterpipe (hookah or nargile or shisha or hubbly bubbly) achieve the same thing? or are they just a way for guys to get together without taking alcohol? you mention the risk of additives. I think waterpipe users don’t just take in tobacco juice in the steam the device creates, but also other stuff which may increase risks. But I will turn this over to people who know better. I have just been busily buying Pakistani and Indian shares in excitement over The Handshake and this would be a great idea if it pans out (or paans out.)

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DrKSSMDPhD
June 2, 2014 5:52 pm

Vivian…I have to plead ignorance on how hookahs work. If they are heating up tobacco, then yes their is vileness with that. The stated way e cigs work is be providing a vapor derived from purified nicotine. I think no one knows for sure if that is all there is, of course.

What always amazes me about tobacco smoke is not that it is as lethal as it it. But that it is not 10 x more lethal than it is. Acrolein, a chemical in tobacco smoke, literally snuffs the life out of mitochondria. That smoking does not kill all straightaway is testimonial to organismal vitality and the resourcefulness of our systems to deal with extreme toxic stresses.

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vivian lewis
June 2, 2014 6:24 pm

dear doc
There may be a good side to acrolein. My readers and I used to own a Canadian firm, Medicago, which produced vaccines using virus-like particles grown in tobacco plants under very strict controls. It was acquired by Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma of Japan.
We currently own another company in Denmark which also grows vaccines (for DARPA, a part of the US Dept of Defense) in the evil weed against diseases. Smallpox might fall into the hands of terrorists so it is developing a vaccine able to inoculate even people with immune system problems. They will get the same vaccine as the population at large. It employs a former scientist at Medicago to help it grow the vaccines made up of virus-like particles in tobacco plants.
This may count as an ontological proof for the existence of God (She loves us and wants us to protect ourselves against smallpox.)
Or maybe it’s a justification for research into tobacco and the research triangle being in North Carolina.

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DrKSSMDPhD
June 2, 2014 6:32 pm

Vivian: quite fascinating! You rock!

Believe it or not, I grew up in NC, and at the time, in the area I was, the way a young kid made money in the summer was, after the 4th of July, to work “priming” tobacco. Priming means picking the lowest, ripest leaves. This was just before the advent of machines that did the work, and of course before the crop fled overseas (little tobacco is grown in NC anymore, but at the time I grew up, it was literally cultivated everywhere there was bare patch of earth).

Young guys were gotten to do it because adults often could not—-it involved staying bent all the way forward for hours at a time, stuffing juicy leaves up under your arm. It is back-horrifying. And one who does this gets coated in tobacco gum and goes home when work is done by mid-day (too hot to continue after that) high as a kite, hovering over the ground, as it were, from the nicotine in the gum. Thus by all rights, I should be a smoker from having gotten hooked on nicotine. But I never have smoked.

Medical schools in NC were the last places on earth to speak out against smoking and to restrict smoking by hospital employees. Why? Those hospitals mostly were built from tobacco money.

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vivianlewis
vivianlewis
June 10, 2014 9:55 am

while on the subject of conflict of interest, how Duke and UNC and other tarheel institutions’ med schools would never criticizie tobacco companies which had endowed them in the first place, I have had an awful idea from the Nick Hodge commentary by our gum-shod leader Travis. Travis hints that Hodge may be leaving clues in his spiels for sub to figure out the stock he is pushing for Travis to find, as he doesn’t really mind if the stock goes up from non-subscribers to his service. That leads me to worrying that Hodge may not really be promoting his service–but also having an interest in the shares it is writing up. Back in the dark ages of print newsletters, when I started mine, you could get money from IR firms to promote a stock in a mass mailing seeking subscribers. You had to put in a footnote in tiny print on the bottom of a page saying this to satisfy the SEC but it was a common way to build up your numbers without having to pay the hefty costs of printing and mailing to do so. Does this now go on electronically as well?
ie does Hodge own some shares of the stock he is promoting which will go up enough thanks to Travis’s detective skills that he can sell them profitably even if the promotion doesn’t succeed in getting sign-ups? are we part of the solution or part of the problem?
fyi of course I never took these IR deals back then except in one case when I had written up a closed end fund I liked and then its manager reprinted the newsletter and sent it out to all its shareholders with my permission, which is not the same thing at all. If the Hodge machine were to reprint the Stock Gumshoe article above, it would count as the same thing.

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PAUL CAMERON
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PAUL CAMERON
April 7, 2015 5:32 pm

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