Healthpoint launches hand sanitizer onto the consumer market
Healthpoint Ltd., a Fort Worth-based DFW Pharmaceuticals Inc. company, officially launched its first product onto the consumer market today.
Ultracept, an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that can last up to six hours, is available to the public through a Web site. The product is the same formula as a product Healthpoint currently sells to hospital systems for use in health care settings and operating rooms, where regulations require that a sanitizing product be long-lasting.
When the H1N1 virus started spreading through North Texas in the spring, company employees started using the hospital product in the company buildings, said Travis Baugh, president and chief operating officer of Healthpoint.
“We had this fantastic product, and we just said, ‘Let’s put it everywhere in the buildings,’†he said.
After employees started using the product to ward off the flu virus, company leaders started thinking about moving the product to the public.
The company focuses on providing products — primarily pharmaceutical and biological treatments for wound care — to health care systems, and even though it offered this sanitizing product to various health markets, it was a small part of Healthpoint’s overall business, Baugh said. He estimated the company’s market with sanitizers in operating rooms was about $6 million a year.
“We’re not a consumer product company,†said Dr. Herbert Slade, chief medical officer of Healthpoint, a physician board certified in pediatrics and clinical immunology.
However, Slade said, the company’s leaders believe the public would choose a sanitizer that has germ- and virus-killing capabilities that are long-lasting.
Lawton Seal, who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology and serves as senior scientific adviser for Healthpoint, said the long-lasting effects are a result of preservatives in Ultracept, which bind to the skin and form a barrier against bacteria. Other hand sanitizers on the consumer market kill germs but then the effects wear off as the alcohol evaporates.
“They work for a brief period of time and then are simply gone,†he said.
Other products used in health care settings have added chemicals that will prevent them from being approved for a consumer market, Baugh said, and so while Healthpoint is not a large player in the health care market, he believes it has an advantage with the consumer market.
The product currently is being made in Lakewood, N.J., home to a manufacturing facility of one of Healthpoint’s sister companies, DPT Laboratories Ltd. Baugh said production will be completely moved to a larger San Antonio facility by about the end of the first quarter of 2010, and that will let the company produce more of the product. Although the product is currently only for sale through its Web site, Ultracept.com, Baugh said he hopes it will be launched on retail shelves in the first half of next year. Two-ounce bottles will retail online in packs of three for $11.97.
