We thought we'd just give a brief history of our company and where we come from.
I'm Dr. Rai. I'm a family physician who practises in Edmonton, Alberta, and I'm here with Mr. Mohamedali, who is the CEO of Smoke NV. I act as the medical director for the company. We have been in the industry since about 2006.
As a company, our goal has always been one of harm reduction. We've always focused on that.
Three things that we've always looked at from the conception of the company were issues that we felt existed within the industry as a whole. One was the manufacturing process. The second was pharmacokinetics and whether nicotine should be placed in the product. The third was how this product should be placed within the marketplace and what regulations we should impose as a company to ensure that minors or young 18-year-olds aren't becoming normalized to the product and using it as a gateway to smoking. Essentially, that's where we started off as a company, and we've answered or tried to answer some of those questions as time has gone on.
As far as the nicotine goes, we as a company have always chosen not to sell the product with nicotine in it. We sell in marketplaces such as the United Kingdom and Australia, without nicotine in our product. We felt at the time of the conception of our company that there wasn't enough data to answer the questions that needed to be answered in regard to nicotine, questions around absorption and potential harm. Really, a lot of the clinical studies just weren't there at that time.
On manufacturing, Shanu can speak to that as to the issues that have come up in manufacturing, the ones that we probably know about and maybe the questions that you might have in regard to the industry. We have filed for a patent on a manufacturing process that can be done within Canada. We've moved forward on that.
On regulation as to how we sell our product within Canada, we have made sure that our product cannot be sold to minors. We have imposed systems on the retailers that sell our product in order to do that.