So I’ll hit that question next. And we are spending millions of dollars on that ourselves and we also have an incredible partner in United Therapeutics who we’re co-developing the organs with. They are, in my opinion, one of the best partners I’ve ever encountered. We are intimately involved with them in developing human organs, which I think will change millions of people’s lives. But because of that, Shannon, that core technology, we’re able now to take our own investments and branch into other areas, which I believe will bring shorter term benefits, like the human tissue work on breast reconstruction, marvelous area, still have to get through FDA approvals and all that, but it’s just one example of dozens of applications in the human body, which will bring midterm — I think of that as kind of midterm benefit.
But then the really, really neat area that we started talking about last year was doing — printing what for us is relatively small, but complex vascularized tissue specimens to sell into the pharmaceutical market. And that’s really neat because you can — there’s a huge payoff for getting better testing of new drugs. If you can take a year or two out of the development cycle of developing a new drug, it’s worth billions of dollars to the company that is doing — participating in that. Obviously, the pharma company gets a lot of benefit from that. We’ll get some benefit from something with the testing. But we will — in that case, we will be selling prepacked, as you can see these on our website, they’re called HBios Organ-on-Chip, where we print vascularized tissue, we implant those scaffolds with human cells, either healthy or diseased.
And the coolest example on the website is on one end, our healthy liver cells all kept alive for — at this point, weeks and months through blood flow through that chip. And on the other end is our cancer cells that they want to test a new drug on. So, when you make this chip, you can pass blood with test drugs through it to look at the effect on the liver cells and on the other end, on the cancer cells in one test. And we can make those specimen, Shannon, by the hundreds and soon to be thousands. We’ll be announcing our new facility down in Houston, which will be the first BioFactory to make those chips in the coming days, okay? We’re in discussions with a large number of pharma companies today and I expect announcements to come out certainly more than one this year about the use of those specimens and drug testing.
So, short-term, I’m incredibly excited about pharma I think and that’s good. And then that doesn’t require direct FDA approval, it’s customer acceptance of the test. We’re screening new drugs. And then the pharma company carries on with more of its traditional screening experiments after that. Mid-term, it’s the human tissue and other human applications and then a longer term is this remarkable opportunity on organs. So, we have a short, medium and long-term focus in Regenerative. But I think we’re ahead of anybody in this industry, particularly in our — through our partnership with United Therapeutics, remarkable, remarkable technology coming out of this so much so that we formed a Medical Advisory Board over the last six months, I’m extremely proud of.
They are remarkable people that are now giving us their insights into our programs and we’re trying to really pave the way for commercialization of these technologies. I think it’s — the benefits to mankind are remarkable and to our shareholders will be equally important. So, I feel great about that work from every side. That may have been more than you wanted to know, but I’ll have to stop myself from talking about it now. I could go on for the rest of the day, Shannon.
