Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[goodplenty100]

This from Stansberry: FMIW

I can look across biotech to see important trends for investors, like cancer therapy, heart devices, or new imaging techniques. That's where technology, medicine, and economics meet. Broadly speaking, it helps pick winners within a sector.

A case in point is cancer immunotherapy, or using your immune system to fight cancer. Results I saw at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Cancer Conference last year were promising – even turning back cancer in advanced lung-cancer patients. Historically, that had been a death sentence.

As Dave explained, a number of major biotech and Big Pharma companies are chasing the goal of halting or reversing the growth of tumors using artificial antibodies. And while Merck, Genentech, and GlaxoSmithKline are all players, he suspects Bristol-Myers Squibb will come out on top...

Bristol has the first new drug, "Yervoy." This gives Bristol the lead in combination therapies – specifically, by adding a second antibody to turn off PD-1. PD-1 is a natural marker on human cells that protects a fetus from a mother's immune system. Cancer uses it to hide.

For generations, "spontaneous remission" of cancer has been considered a miracle. But technically, your immune system triggers it... Like if you caught scarlet fever and your body cured that, plus skin cancer, too. Bristol is standardizing miracles.

Bristol is an expensive stock by most metrics. It trades for 32 times trailing 12-month earnings and for nearly five times sales. But the stock has been bid up to these levels for its as unrealized market potential for curing cancer. On the medical side, though, the promise of immunotherapy is increasingly clear. And we will learn more at the upcoming ASCO Cancer Conference in June.