By: AllPennyStocks.com News

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

In the course of trying to address a variety of diseases, the underlying cause is sometimes ignored in the grand scheme of the illness. That’s not to say that many companies, especially biotechs, don’t recognize causes, it’s just a fact of the matter that many of the diseases will still happen at alarming rates as a simple course of nature. For example, nearly everyone is aware of higher cancer and death rates related to smoking. Yet, millions of people still smoke. Need another? Instances of diabetes are much higher for people that are obese. While there is a legitimate argument that obesity is a disease and smoking is a choice (perhaps “co-morbidity” would be a more appropriate term in the case of obesity being a disease related to diabetes), the point is that finding a solution for either will not ultimately eradicate the disease. But…finding solutions for smoking cessation and obesity should greatly help to reduce occurrence rates which would have a substantial impact on the overall cost of healthcare. The same philosophy holds true for many other diseases other than the aforementioned. Many companies are firmly entrenched in various avenues of this space and offer a substantial upside with approvals and penetration of billion-dollar markets. Vivus (Nasdaq:VVUS) and Arena Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq:ARNA) both received FDA approval this year for their obesity drugs. Star Scientific (Nasdaq:STSI) and 22nd Century Group (OTCBB:XXII) are beating down the smoking cessation path. Apropos, VVUS, ARNA and STSI are all making nice moves over the last few days and XXII looks to be poised to rise off a bottom.

In the news today is wellness company Neutra Corp. (OTCBB:NTRR) trumpeting their mission to find novel ways to eliminate addictive urges, primarily as related to alcoholism in this morning’s press. The Tampa, Florida-based company specializes in the development of nutritional supplements, nutrient booster, herbal remedies and other wellness products.

The company finds itself in a crowded nutraceutical industry that has many upstarts looking to grow riches, but its focus on alcoholism is particularly interesting should they effectively develop a product to address the disease. As Neutra chief executive Michael-Shane Henderson says, “The market potential for a product capable of helping to end alcoholism is nearly incalculable.” Is that true for any disease? Sure it is, but there’s not many public companies targeting the disease, although there are biotechs, such as InterMune (Nasdaq:ITMN) who looked to develop drugs to address some of the deadly outcomes such as severe liver scarring known as cirrhosis.

As Neutra observes, the American Council for Drug Education says that approximately 10-15 million people in the U.S. alone can be classified as alcoholics. About 4.5 million of them are adolescents. The Center for Disease Control reports that 79,000 deaths annually are the direct result of excessive alcohol consumption and it’s the third leading lifestyle-related cause of death in the country as well as the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 24.

“According to stats from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), alcohol abuse costs the United States over $235 billion each year,” says Henderson while noting that a large portion of those costs go to direct treatment of alcoholism.

Looking to develop a holistic approach to curb the craving for alcohol may be a daunting task and Neutra may be years away from the remedy, but the concept is intriguing to learn more about. From an investor standpoint, the company has a microscopic 600,000 shares outstanding equating to a $900,000 market capitalization at today’s price of $1.50 per share. This does give them some flexibility to add some shares for financing and generate liquidity and a bit of a competitive edge over many other micro-caps who have diluted their shares structure to death in the expensive research and development stages while striving for commercialization. Whether or not NTRR will follow along the same path remains to be seen, but for the time being things appear to be in order and now it is up to the company to execute on their vision. Proper due diligence is, as always, encouraged.

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