Cancer is no longer a fatal illness thanks to advancements in diagnosis and treatment
Here's how you can support these advancements.
Servaas Michielssens, head of healthcare at asset manager Candriam, states that "nothing is as complex as cancer, which is aptly called the emperor of all maladies." The emperor has been extending his sphere of influence. Recently, there has been an increase in cancer cases. This is a result of both the aging population and the fact that people are becoming fatter. According to healthcare investor Paul Major, it is concerning that the average age of onset of certain diseases, like colorectal cancer, is becoming younger and younger.
According to Moritz Dullinger of Pictet Asset Management, early detection of cancer increases the likelihood of survival and reduces the amount of money that healthcare systems must spend on patient care. Researchers are "a tremendous amount of excited" about their efforts to discover new methods for early cancer detection. Joseph Cordi, co-manager of the Impax Asset Management US Large Cap Strategy fund, notes that improvements in cancer diagnostics are anticipated in the years to come.
"Liquid biopsies" for cancer diagnostics are showing great promise.
The Billion Dollar Blindspot: Why Women's Health Is the Investment Opportunity of Our Time author and global wealth and investment strategist Maryann Selfe claims that most systems, particularly in the US, are "set up for sickcare, not healthcare." As a result, diagnosis is mostly "reactive," and patients are expected to visit their physicians when they experience symptoms. However, for many cancers, it might be too late; by the time symptoms appear, the cancer might not be curable.
There are limitations to even the few proactive cancer screening programs that are currently in place. According to Simon Vincent, chief scientific officer at Breast Cancer Now, although mammography has been shown to aid in the early detection of breast cancer, it "doesn't necessarily spot all types of breast cancer equally well." This is particularly true for lobular breast cancer, which makes up about 15% of all cases of breast cancer. The offer of mammograms is restricted to certain age groups, and none of the UK's four regions are currently meeting their targets. GPs who are overworked might be reluctant to order tests for people who don't belong to these groups.
Amanda Rice, the CEO and founder of Chick Mission and a three-time cancer survivor, has personally witnessed these shortcomings. When she went to the doctor in her 30s, worried about her symptoms, the doctor dismissed her because he believed it was unlikely to be anything serious given her age. Before receiving a formal breast cancer diagnosis, she had to put in a lot of effort to obtain the necessary tests. She would have likely accepted her doctor's assurance or foregone the extra tests because they were "so painful, invasive and costly" if she hadn't been so insistent.
The search for blood tests capable of diagnosing cancer has been prompted by the shortcomings of conventional cancer diagnostic techniques. These "liquid biopsies" look for "circulating tumour DNA" (ctDNA), which are tiny pieces of DNA that cancer cells release into the blood. According to Major, the goal is to develop tests that are sensitive enough to detect even minute amounts of such DNA, thereby identifying the illness early. The ultimate goal is to develop a "multi-cancer early detection test" (MCED) that can detect a variety of cancers and that you can take every few years. Some tests screen for mutations linked to specific cancers.
A major obstacle is that any test must have both the specificity to prevent a high number of false-positives, which would clog healthcare systems and put patients through needless stress, and the sensitivity to identify the presence of disease at an early stage. It must also be reasonably priced. It's hard to meet all three requirements. According to Major, Grail's Galleri MCED test "wasn't quite effective enough and produced too many false-positives for the NHS to use" in a recent large trial.
According to Vincent, despite these obstacles, there is hope that liquid biopsies will become "incredibly valuable," particularly for cancers for which there is no specific screening program or for those that are currently undetected until they have begun to spread throughout the body. According to Erin Xie, managing director and portfolio manager for health sciences at BlackRock, the market for liquid biopsies was already valued between £5 billion and £10 billion in 2025 and is predicted to reach £10 billion£20 billion by the end of the decade.
According to Major, blood tests that look for a greater variety of possible cancer indicators are probably going to be more successful in identifying cancer than those that only use ctDNA. DXcover, a business that emerged from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, is one that is engaged in this. According to CEO Matthew Baker, MCED looks for DNA, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates to determine whether cancer is present. Even though only a small percentage of brain cancers shed ctDNA, trials have shown that these tests can detect malignant brain cancer with an 86% sensitivity. Additionally, they may identify a wider variety of cancers in their early stages.
A blood sample may not even be required for certain cancer diagnostic tests. For instance, a test created by Serox uses surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to detect urine cancer in less than three minutes. According to Cici Muldoon, CEO and founder of Serox, this makes screening much simpler because obtaining samples won't require skilled phlebotomists. Serox is developing a lateral-flow type stick that functions similarly to a pregnancy test. In addition to collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital in the US and John Radcliffe Hospital in the UK, Serox is still in the early phases of fundraising.
Raman lens.
From identification to therapy.
According to Michielssens, illness detection is "only part of the equation." Additionally, cancer diagnostic tests can help guide treatment (companion diagnostics) and identify minimal residual disease (MRD), which is the tiny number of cancer cells that may still be present in the body after otherwise successful treatment. They can also be used to assess the effectiveness of a treatment. For instance, ctDNA is released when tumor cells die, so an abrupt rise in ctDNA levels right after treatment may be a sign that the therapy is effective.
According to vice-president Neil Ward, other more intricate genetic tests, such as those offered by businesses like PacBio, "can give an indication as to whether a patient's cancer is becoming resistant to a particular treatment."
CanCertain is another business that operates in the field where personalized medicine and cancer diagnostics intersect. According to its business development director Dharmesh Mehta, the company has created a test that allows doctors to "pre-screen cancer treatments on the patient's own cells." In order for the oncologist to know ahead of time what is likely to succeed and what is likely to fail, circulating tumor cells are taken from patients' blood and exposed to possible treatments. To test the technology, CanCertain is collaborating with the University of Leeds and the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester.
In order to eradicate any remaining cancer cells, patients usually need to receive adjuvant treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, even if the initial therapies are successful in treating the cancer. According to Gareth Powell, head of healthcare at Polar Capital, patients are then watched to see if there is any indication that the cancer has returned. According to Powell, liquid biopsies can frequently lessen the need for adjuvant therapy and allow for quicker follow-up care in the event that the cancer returns. According to Michielssens, there is a significant need for precise MRD tests because there are almost 20 million cancer survivors in the US alone.
A technological revolution in scanning.
An MRI machine.
In addition to the creation of more effective blood tests, radiology and imaging are beginning to experience a revolution of their own. According to Lizzie Tuckey, managing director of the imaging platform Scan . com, the typical MRI machine "isn't fundamentally different from the first machines produced by Peter Mansfield and his team nearly 50 years ago, they are lighter, can fit in smaller locations and don't need as much power." AI developments are also changing the software that computers use.
Radiologists can now use fewer images without sacrificing the final image's quality thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which has made the process of taking numerous body images and then combining them much more efficient. As a result, fewer patients must spend time inside the scanner, allowing for the scanning of more patients and lowering costs. In the case of CT scans, the patient's radiation exposure is decreased because they spend less time in the scanner. Additionally, AI is highly adept at identifying minute variations over time.
Ezra, a division of Function Health, is one company utilizing AI to reduce the cost and time of MRI scans. According to founder and CEO Emi Gal, Ezra already provides thorough scans for the majority of organs and tissues in just 22 minutes, which is "typically the time most other providers would take to scan a single major organ." The company has set a medium-term goal of five minutes for repeat visits and hopes to cut this time down to fifteen minutes by next year.
In the UK, Ezra's multi-organ scan currently costs 1,299, making it a premium product. However, Gal says he hopes to lower the US price to about £500 soon because prices are declining. An annual MRI scan to monitor various changes in the body "could become something that everyone does, in the same way that we give smokers low-dose CT to screen for lung cancer, or give women who are over a specific age regular mammograms" once this occurs.
As we can already see from the "explosion" in the number of patents filed (generally a good leading indicator of future development) and the number of devices approved, the technology is only likely to continue making scans faster and less expensive in the future. According to Robert Wiseman, Rob Sackin, and Alexander Frank of Reddie and Grose patent and trade mark lawyers, the Food and Drug Administration, the US regulator, has approved 1,451 AI-enabled medical devices as of this writing, "of which around 80 percent are in the field of radiology."
Enhancing the experience for the patient.
Wiseman, Sacklin, and Frank believe that in addition to enhancing medical imaging, AI could help expedite "the patient's journey" by ensuring that patients are referred to the appropriate specialists, that the right tests are performed, and that these tests are then appropriately analyzed. Although this kind of development is less visible to the general public due to the legal ambiguity surrounding software patents, they believe that there is a lot of work being done in this area behind the scenes.
XCures, a service platform that "basically aggregates, organises and structures medical records," is one business at the forefront of utilising AI to compile the enormous amount of medical data accessible to physicians, according to CEO Mika Newton. Rather than physicians "having to read thousands of pages of medical records and then manually input the information into their own system, the information can be extracted automatically, enabling them to see all the important information quickly." For instance, the technology can create a more structured version of unstructured records, like scans and medical notes.
In the long run, accelerating the flow of data through the medical system may aid in the diagnosis of cancer by allowing researchers to identify new links between different symptoms and cancers that human researchers might not be able to identify on their own.
Opening medical records in this manner (with appropriate consent) could accelerate advancements in cancer diagnosis and treatment, as only 5% of cancer patients are currently enrolled in clinical trials.
According to Flann Horgan and Mitchell Goldberg of NTT Data, AI can also assist hospitals and healthcare systems in selecting among the numerous cancer tests that are suddenly on the market, many of which are developed by small businesses with extremely specialized applications. Researchers can now "evaluate lots of different algorithms without having to fly all over the world, and then integrate them into their workflow" thanks to a platform that NTT Data recently developed in collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital.
The Hayward, California office of Illumina.
The finest cancer diagnostic products available right now.
Exact Sciences was a major player in the liquid biopsy market until recently. It created Cancerguard, an independent blood-based multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test, and had several of its tests approved. The company was purchased this year by Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT). The agreement gives Abbott a significant presence in the market, even though liquid biopsy is only one aspect of the company, which also sells medications and cardiovascular devices. In fact, Grgoire Biollaz of Pictet Asset Management notes that Exact Sciences gives Abbot's Diagnostics division a faster-growing segment with its high-teen revenue growth. Abbott offers a yield of 2.5 percent and is trading at 17 times the projected 2027 earnings.
Guardant Health (Nasdaq: GH) is a more pure play on liquid biopsies. The current stool-based test for colorectal cancer has already been replaced with a more practical blood test. But according to healthcare investor Paul Major, the colorectal test is actually "just a proof of concept" for Guardant's more ambitious medium-term plans for additional MCED tests. Additionally, Guardant is creating a test to identify cancer residues and one to help direct treatment. Although its revenues more than tripled between 2020 and 2025, it is currently not profitable.
Additionally, Major is a huge supporter of Adaptive Biotechnologies (Nasdaq: ADPT). It has already created clonoseq, a test to find leftover tumor cells in lymphoid cancers that has been approved by the US regulator. Many pharmaceutical companies use it in clinical trials to assess the efficacy of their products, and it can be used to guide treatment decisions, saving many patients from needless chemotherapy. It is currently losing money, just like a lot of biotechnology companies, but sales are skyrocketing. Major thinks it's a prime target for a big business trying to buy its core technology.
RadNet (Nasdaq: RDNT) is the top imaging company in the United States. RadNet has discovered a way to undercut hospitals, which means that numerous US insurance companies will attempt to persuade patients to use the company's services, as Gareth Powell of Polar Capital explains. The company has been spending a lot of money on creating AI that can read scans; this technology has been proven in clinical trials, and it is currently being implemented. Although revenues have practically doubled between 2020 and 2025, the stock is currently trading at an expensive 57 times estimated 2027 earnings. It is anticipated to continue its robust growth.
According to Dullinger and Biollaz, Siemens Healthineers (Frankfurt: SHL) is "in a very good position" with regard to manufacturing MRI and CT scanners. Additionally, Siemens manufactures a variety of medical devices, and any increase in the number of blood tests performed will be advantageous to its laboratory division. Between 2020 and 2025, sales increased by two-thirds, and the stock is currently trading at just fifteen times 2027 earnings. The yield is 2.9 percent.
Lastly, Daytrading . com's Dan Buckley is a fan of Illumina (Nasdaq: ILMN). It offers a large portion of the infrastructure required for using genomics to diagnose cancer and for using diagnostics to guide treatment. At 23 times 2027 earnings, the stock is trading.
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