Innovation

Oasis is a privately owned company and the CEO and founder, Afif Ghannoum, is in charge of a very simplistic, but very profitable business in the consumer healthcare category. It is a very unique company that gets into the healthcare business without going through the regulatory approval process before getting their products out to sale because the active ingredients and nutritional value is already regulated by the FDA - either in other products or very similar products. “The aim is to take innovations and instead of going through a 10-year process of approval for a drug, take previously approved components and use them more efficiently,” said CEO Ghannoum.

This company has around 11 different products, but their new big innovation is in probiotics. Probiotics are known to be nutritional, good bacteria in the human microorganism flora, but no one was studying them. Even the NIH was not funding studies on probiotics because it was little known. Oasis found that fungus plays a very important role in the gut along with microorganism flora. So not only the microorganism is important but also the mycobiome is very important to understand as well. “First innovation in this area and Cleveland Clinic called for the watch of the mycobiome for 2017 being big,” said Ghannoum. This new product comes from a great collaboration of the CEO’s father, who discovered the importance of fungus in the microorganism flora of the human gut. “Through the breakthrough discovery of my father, we came up with the idea of creating a probiotic that has all the components that the human body needs,” he continued.

The great opportunity about this product is that probiotics are already a known product that helps and enriches nutrition to the micro flora in the human gut. The innovation in this product is addressing the good fungi in the human micro flora. The advertisement for this product is minimum because other probiotic alternatives have done that very well in the healthcare environment.

It was found that fungus played a very important role in the cause of Crohn’s Disease, which has no cure and incidence is growing every year with around 200,000 cases per year. Digestive health being a multimillion dollar market, this company saw a great opportunity to not only be aligned with the UN Global Goal of good health and well-being but also be in a very profitable business targeting consumers with gastrointestinal problems. We will be able to find these products in major pharmacy retailers like CVS, Walgreens, etc.

Inspiration

Afif Ghannoum originally worked as a corporate lawyer and his father worked at a hospital near the Cleveland area as a doctor and researcher through NIH funds. They came together in 2010 and created Oasis Consumer Healthcare with a mindset of trying to do what pharmaceuticals do, but with a much quicker inception to sales turnaround. This is what gave them the idea to use only pre-approved drug ingredients and therefore avoid regulatory approval. They already have around 11 products and are in 27,000 major healthcare retailers. They also recently came up with a completely new probiotic product that comes out in the spring of 2017.

Overall impact

Oasis is an organization that makes profit while innovating in the healthcare space. Providing consumers products that keep the gut and other parts of the body healthy through natural remedies, without the long wait for approval is a sustainable and simplistic way to operate a business. This company is one that is on track to becoming a flourishing company through simple ways of innovating.

Business benefit

CEO Ghannoum oversees the science around the product to make sure it is completely valid and backed up by research, makes small tweaks that don’t require a lengthy approval process, and creates an efficient healthcare product. Their new probiotic innovation is the perfect example of this. According to the CEO, once they get inspiration they work on scaling it up and getting it to consumers that really need the product most. Usually with probiotic products there is not a lot of effort in advertising. Oasis is changing the game by utilizing Facebook to reach future consumers, for example targeting people who have interest in digestive diseases. Facebook is a very useful tool for their advertisement and especially in education for the product because they can target people who have intestinal issues, not like a TV advertisement where people these days record the program and skip over the commercials. Oasis knows that they have been doing a good job with this simplistic way of advertising because they have grown annually 20-30% in sales and in revenues.

In addition to having an innovative product, they are innovating their marketing channels to better target customers. “Entrepreneurship is very scary and you need to take the leap. It has peaks and valleys and may fail, but if it turns out good it can really work out, that's not going to happen if you get a normal job”. The CEO of Oasis Consumer Healthcare not only has innovative ways of keeping in sync with the UN Global Goal of good health and well-being but also a very innovative way of doing very efficient and simplistic business. “80% of the equation is not what happens if it works, but what happens if it fails," he said.

Social and environmental benefit

Oasis has as a mission to promote good health and wellbeing while being a small, simple and profitable company. This method of drug development can be a great help to society by helping to tackle pervasive diseases. By being efficient with their time and resources they are able to become a more sustainable company while producing quality healthcare products. With the use of technology, the company is affecting our world in a net positive way by reducing costs and waste tremendously. They have a fast time-to-market because they do not need to go through the very long regulatory approval for release. Consumers that need this product can get it quickly and within a very safe way. Gastrointestinal diseases are very prevalent in the whole world and by continuing to research and help the human gut, prevalence will decrease. Because of this goal they also want to keep their company small, as efficiency is their main value proposition. “It is okay to have a specific amount of people if we produce thousands of products or millions of products," said Ghannoum.

Good health and well-being is linked to this innovation by trying to help the goal of supporting the research and development of vaccines and medicines for the communicable and noncommunicable diseases that primarily affect developing countries and provide access to affordable essential medicines and vaccines. This product improves health for the human gut and lowers risks of gastrointestinal diseases. It is affordable and it is accessible for every human being since it is a supplement available in major retailers and small neighborhood pharmacies. Improving the health around every single community is Oasis' common goal with UN Global Goal for good health and well-being. This is also a very important first step for more good fungi in the human gut for future diagnosis differentials and new and more efficient development of medications and vaccines.

Interview

Afif Ghannoum, CEO