I mean, you can approach it many different ways. So there’s a lot going on. In nitric oxide, it’s an untapped part of medicine, in my opinion, and the opinion of most, if not everyone, at Beyond Air. There’s a lot going on with nitric oxide as you can see in the neuro space now with autism. This is not something in our opinion that takes away from the focus on the launch of the product. That is our number one focus is our commercial launch by far. And for Beyond Cancer, their number one focus is cancer. That’s why we spun that program out into its own company because we didn’t want to have — there’d be an impact on our Beyond Air activities. So that’s why it was separately funded and that’s why there’s a whole management team and group of people there doing an amazing job.
So really, I guess autism is the new kid on the block, so to speak, that is different than what Beyond Air proper is doing with LungFit PH, LungFit PRO and LungFit GO. And this is obviously very early stage. It was a great opportunity. We love what Dr. Amal at Hebrew University has done. It’s very unique. And really we hope that when we get into humans, it’s going to bare itself out as it did in the mice. If it does, we can really make an impact and make a difference. So this is not a very expensive program at this point, it doesn’t take a lot of our people at this point. As we go forward over the next 12 to 18 months, there’ll be a little bit more expense, which we talked about last week when we told everyone about this program and you can refer to that in our presentation.
And it’s still not that much of an incremental hit to the people on our team, especially on the commercial side, it’s got nothing to do with the commercial team at all. And the people who support the commercial team, they have nothing to do. The ones who work with autism, we have statisticians and pharmacologists and so forth and scientists, they’re not doing anything for the commercial launch. So, yes, it’s a little bit maybe extra for me, but I like to work 100 hours a week, so it’s not a big deal for me. I got to fill my time somehow. So this is a big program, but it’s early stage and perhaps in 12 to 18 months or 18 to 24 months, when we’re in a human study and we’re getting results, then it might take on a little bit more need and more focus, and that’s when the ROI really needs to be discussed because I don’t want it to take away from the other programs.
But we’ll see when we get there and we’ll see how this program progresses. So that’s kind of how we look at it. Cancer, we realized was too big for our bridges at that time and we moved it over to have a great team run it, who — people who are cancer experts. In this situation, I don’t think autism has risen to the point where we need so called autism experts or neurological expertise. Although I would like to point out that our new Chief Medical Officer has certainly done a lot of work in nitric oxide, actually did PhD thesis in nitric oxide way back in the day when he was younger and has done work in neurological space with respect to nitric and has done work in other neuro areas that are non-nitric related. So, he brings some expertise there to help out Dr. Amal in Israel and his lab and some of the other people that we have on our team.
