Thursday, February 15, 2018

CANCER AND THE STOCK MARKET

 
KING AND QUEEN OF THE BEAUMONT HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR PROM
66 years later
 
  Do you hate cancer?  Do you have piles of money sitting around, waiting to be invested?  Well, if you are like me your answers will be” of course” and “get serious”.  However, if you can answer “yes” to both questions, it behooves you to read this article, from a recent Economist magazine:
The way things seem to work nowadays is that tiny firms are created to investigate and possibly exploit new research breakthroughs.  These little fish are then swallowed tail and chin whiskers by much larger fish – collectively known as Big Pharma.  These large fish have the resources to do the requisite clinical trials, and wrestle with the FDA over the results.  And, the article implies, the FDA is uncommonly quick to render a verdict on a cancer drug because, “people are dying, and they are dying now.”
All this takes money.  Ideally the Feds would allocate enough to support a healthy research program, but they don’t.  And, there aren’t enough Jeff Bezos’s and Bill Gates’s to go around.  To some extent, it’s up to us. We can give our money directly to research organizations, as I do with Linda’s fund at Fred Hutch, or we can invest it in little-fish firms doing development work.  Then, when (and if) our little fish gets engulfed by the likes of Pfizer or Merck we can invest our profits in another little fish.  Or, if your anti-capitalist soul rebels at profit, send the filthy stuff to me.  I’ll put it to good work!
 


1 comment:

  1. Every now and then my reading serves up evidence of how tightly bound-at-the-hip cancer research and the stock market tend to be. As you may know, I receive regular notifications from Google about news item relevant to ovarian cancer. Several days ago I stumbled on three notifications of a news release by an outfit that calls itself Fate Therapeutics. It seems that Fate has concluded a Phase I study involving two (!) women, and deems its results encouraging. No less than three stock sites presented the release to the general (stock buying) public. Here it is:

    https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Fate+Therapeutics+%28FATE%29+Announces+Initial+Clinical+Data+of+FATE-NK100+for+Recurrent+Ovarian+Cancer/13998278.html

    Fate Therapeutics is located in La Jolla, DA. Its shares currently sell for just under ten bucks, but variability is high. Last year Fate lost just over one buck per share. You can buy into Fate through your broker; it is listed in NASDAQ.

    I wouldn’t.

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