BUSINESS BITS

Wart remover
MARIE ANNE FAJARDO

Rolando De la Cruz has never failed to amaze people he had helped with his skin-care solutions, but the one-time barber and eventual world-class inventor got himself on the way to inventing quite by accident. De la Cruz was supporting himself in college early 1970s through barbering, a skill his father had passed on to him, when once he felt burning sensation in his mouth and hands after eating raw cashew nuts.
His mother told De la Cruz, who had wanted to study medicine but settled for commerce, that raw cashew seed produced skin-burning oil when cracked open. He filed that information in his head. Meanwhile, he used his idle time in the barbershop to create an herbal-cream preparation that would remove unwanted warts and moles with out surgery.

Naturally, he used the very same oil that once tormented him to develop the cream, and then he offered it to customers as an extra service to get more of them to pick him for their haircut. Later, he started building a small laboratory to perfect his cream.

De la Cruz knew he had a winner in his cream, and in 1998 the Department of Science and Technology shared that view when it gave him its Tuklas Award for Most Outstanding Invention. The department so believed in his product that it sent him to join international competitions later, and De la Cruz delivered when he received that bronze medal at the 27th International Exhibit of Inventions, New Techniques and Products in Geneva in 1999.

In 2000 he won the gold at the I-TEX 2000 competition in Kuala Lumpur, and the following year another gold medal at the INPEX XVII in Pittsburgh, U.S.A. He has since joined invention shows in Korea, Japan and Russia.

With the science department fully behind him, De la Cruz took only one year to get his product patented and just P50,000 to start his company. He felt he didn’t need a large capital – only some exposure in trade fairs and large “before, during, and after” pictures of his mole and wart removal treatments in his clinics’ walls. (He now counts many patients including surgeons, and some of them have even helped him in some of his clinical studies.)

And ever since he received his license from the Bureau of Food and Drugs for his Dewart and Demole products in December 1997, De la Cruz has continued to improve his herbal preparations and to find more cures for other skin problems. One such was a treatment for basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.

De la Cruz had discovered the cure with the help of his wife and children, and he first tested it on a patient who had come to him for help but whom he had made to sign a letter of consent because De la Cruz wasn’t even sure of his herbal cream could undo the heavy skin damage caused by carcinoma. De la Cruz started giving his small doses just to see if the cream could work. After few treatment sessions, the patient cured of carcinoma. The treatment proved so simple but so amazing that De la Cruz beat some 1,500 finalist in Russia when he introduced the product in competition there in November 2004.

Equally, Dela Cruz’s wart and mole treatment is so simple but so effective that it requires only 10-15 minutes to apply. It was the winning pitch that allowed him to grow his business in the major malls and to buy his own building to set up a modern laboratory.

“I’ve always had satisfied customers; no one has ever complained,” says Dela Cruz, now vice president of the Chamber of Herbal Industries of the Philippines, a director of the Filipino Inventors’ Society, and head of the RCC Amazing Touch International with clinics in the local malls and partnership agreements in Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States.