Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Matt Kaplan of Ladenburg Thalmann.
Matthew Kaplan - Ladenburg Thalmann
Hi, Steve. Good morning.
Stephen Willard
Good morning, Matt. How are you?
Matthew Kaplan - Ladenburg Thalmann
Doing well. Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions. First off, congratulations on getting the license agreements solidify with Merck Serono on getting the upfront payment of 5 million euros. Can you give us a little bit more color in terms of the maturation process, lets call it the current license agreements, and specifically looking at a couple of things, you touched on this during your opening remarks, but when do you additional milestones coming from the other feasibility studies and agreements, are these things near-term. And then a second part of that question and a little bit longer term when do you think you could have the next new either product to market using Medusa or Micropump technology?
Stephen Willard
Sure. First of all thank you for your congratulations on the 5 million euros. I think that is simply as I mentioned in my remarks an important piece of the relationship on that one project alone, we have invoiced more than $13 million in total. And so there is a lot of, while people look at sort of the big numbers, there is a lot in addition to the big milestone payments that pay our bills and lead to the stronger and stronger financial results that we have been able to achieve over the past two or three years.
With regard to other milestones as I said in my remarks, we have been working very hard over the past couple of years to increase to 15 to 17 whatever partnered programs. And these programs have been in development for some period of time if you were to look, for example, at the corporate presentation that Flamel has on its website, you will see that a year-over-year comparison from March of 2008 we had two projects at the end of March 2008 that were in preclinical or beyond, we now have 15. And so you can see graphically from that presentation how our projects have moved forward and obviously as we get into pre-clinical and beyond the chances of milestones and further beneficial commercial turns increased substantially. So, as I see 50 in projects now in pre-clinical or beyond, the opportunity for catalysts is certainly considerably better than it has been as recently a year ago.
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