Freeze, warts! Product adds to removal lineup

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A company that's quickly boosted revenues with its 20-minute test for the AIDS virus wants to add to the momentum with an over-the-counter weapon against the less-deadly but still widely despised virus that causes common warts.
Demand for OraSure's OraQuick HIV antibody test has boomed since it gained federal approval in November, and it received a waiver in January to allow its use at doctors' offices, mobile testing vans and HIV counseling centers. The company has moved into a new building on the site of Bethlehem Steel's old mill on the Lehigh River.
Now OraSure is plunging into the wart-removal market, licensing Medtech Inc. to sell wart-freezing kits to the public under the established Compound W wart-treatment brand.
With more than $1 million worth of its product shipped and a $9 million television advertising campaign under way, the company started by two entrepreneurs in a state-sponsored technology incubation center is predicting it will gain profitability by the end of the year.
Compound W Freeze Off is on the shelves at Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target discount stores, drugstores and some food stores.
Common problem
People are always looking for ways to cure warts, said Dr. Anthony J. Mancini, an associate professor of pediatrics and dermatology at Northwestern University medical school.
"They are common; they are visible; they carry a certain social stigma. Some parents are concerned if their children play with other children who have them," said Mancini, also an attending physician at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. "Anything that would be a potential treatment over the counter would be welcomed with open arms."
Freeze Off is an over-the-counter version of a cryosurgery product called Histofreezer that OraSure has marketed to physicians for a decade. The company has sold some 40 million Histofreezer wart treatments to doctors.
The competition
The consumer version joins remedies that include various liquid and film treatments -- but only one other wart-freezing method on the U.S. over-the-counter market, the Wartner Wart Removal system.
LDS Consumer Products launched the Wartner product in April after buying North American marketing rights from Wartner Medical Products in the Netherlands, and said it quickly became the leading wart remover with 12.4 percent of dollar sales for a four-week period in June and July.
Freeze Off hopes to overtake that with a $9 million television ad campaign -- featuring a worker carrying a steaming chemical in a laboratory and a mother safely applying Freeze Off to a child at home -- that started at the end of August.
OraSure sold the first $1.2 million worth of Freeze Off to Medtech during the second quarter, and said Medtech has agreed to buy at least $2 million worth a year to retain exclusive distribution rights.
Other remedies
Duct tape can cure warts, according to a study published last October. The test involved applying the tape for six days, removing it, soaking the area and scraping it, and reapplying the tape. The treatment took up to two months.
Mancini said he's had success with a nightly application of wart-remover liquid with duct tape over it. But the "gold standard" for dermatologists is freezing warts with liquid nitrogen, he said.
"This is a painful therapy. It does burn, you have blistering, and eventually it falls off," Mancini said. Liquid nitrogen requires large, hard-to-maintain tanks and is dangerously cold: minus 195 degrees Celsius. "Nobody would ever let a family take home liquid nitrogen," he said.
Over-the-counter wart freezers use milder refrigerants that work at safer temperatures.