You’ve surely heard the bad news on COVID-19 vaccines by now...
It turns out, Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine isn’t 100% safe for everyone.
The company confirmed six recipients (out of more than 7 million) developed a rare blood clot disorder.
Sadly, one died.
What’s strange is all six cases were women between the ages of 18 and 48.
And scientists don’t know why.
Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence with drugs and vaccines...
Different peoples’ bodies react differently to the same drugs.
So, many drugs that work great in most folks... will harm or even kill others who take it.
This sad problem has plagued drug development for much longer than I’ve been analyzing tiny biotech stocks professionally (13 years).
But FINALLY...
A new technology is emerging that’s going to solve it.
It’s a true game changer that, I believe, will permanently end most of the uncertainty and danger in drug development.
This tech should save millions of lives over time.
Today, I’ll tell you about the only microcap stock in the world that’s using this technology to fight cancer.
But first, let’s look at why this big breakthrough is coming at the perfect time…
Did you know about 9 in 10 drugs fail in human trials?
That’s because developing new drugs is very, very hard.
Every year, hundreds of promising drugs that could save lives make it to human trials...
And almost all of them eventually fail.
More often than not, even the world’s best scientists are baffled as to why.
I’ll spare you the technical details. But by the time a drug candidate makes it to clinical trials on humans, it’s already beat the odds. It’s already passed years of rigorous lab and animal tests. And the company developing the drug has already invested millions of dollars in it.
When you factor all that in, the success rate of new drugs is more like 1 in 100.
But here’s the key:
Drugs that fail in human trials aren’t necessarily ineffective.
Oftentimes, drugs are targeted to the wrong patients.
You see, drug trials are typically comprised of large groups of patients from many walks of life.
The trials are good at summarizing the average effectiveness of the drug across the entire group of patients.
But trials are bad at accounting for variations among individuals.
In other words... some drugs work better in women than men. Some drugs work better in older folks than younger folks.
A drug may not work at all for a 35-year-old man with a family history of diabetes... but that very same drug could save the life of a 72-year-old woman with high blood pressure!
Drug trials are bad at sorting all this out.
Scientists have been dealing with this shortcoming for over 70 years. But until recently, there’s not much they could do about it.
There are THOUSANDS of human traits that could influence how well a drug works. Scientists would have to parse an overwhelming amount of data to differentiate which drugs are likely to work on which people.
But we’ve reached a critical breakthrough.
And it’s all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI)…
In its simplest terms, AI is a computer program or system that’s able to learn and make decisions.
AI mirrors our learning process in a way. Researchers feed it data, like medical images, scientific papers, case reports, and clinical trial data.
The more data researchers feed it, the more of an “expert” it becomes.
Unlike a human, the AI retains everything. It doesn’t forget. It can find patterns and connections to make sense of all the data to draw conclusions and make predictions.
In mere seconds, AI can accomplish tasks that would take a team of human researchers years or even decades!
And this isn’t some pipe dream. AI is disrupting the drug development industry right now.
Take the drug Tavocept.
BioNumerik Pharmaceuticals originally developed this drug to treat a type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma.
The company spent millions studying the drug in more than 1,000 patients.
It showed promise. In a Phase 3 clinical trial, the drug boosted patients’ two-year survival rate by 20%.
But it didn’t work on enough of the patients. The drug failed in Phase 3, the final step before potential FDA approval.
So the drug was shelved…
A few years later a small private company came along and bought the rights to Tavocept.
Why would a company buy rights to failed drug?
Because this company’s proprietary Artificial Intelligence had deciphered a secret about the effectiveness of Tavocept...
This company’s AI figured out something that scientists had never realized.
By crunching the data, the AI figured out this type of lung cancer is essentially a different disease in smokers than in people who have never smoked.
In short, Tavocept does not work on smokers.
So the initial trials, which included smokers, were doomed to fail.
But Tavocept is likely a very effective treatment for patients who’ve never smoked.
Data from the Phase 3 trial showed that the drug boosted the two-year survival rate of never-smokers by a whopping 125%.
Now, a new trial is being designed to confirm these amazing results.
This lung cancer is the most common type of lung cancer in nonsmokers.
So Tavocept could save a lot of lives.
The company that achieved this has since gone public and trades as a microcap.
This company’s AI analyzes billions of cancer-specific data points to match drugs with the right patients… and develops targeted cancer drugs cheaper, faster, and with greater precision and less risk.
Analyzing this much data would take human scientists lifetimes. It would take a human more than 30 years just to count a billion data points, let alone try to analyze anything about that data.
This company is still under the radar, having gone public last year in a small, quiet IPO. Only two analysts on all of Wall Street cover the stock.
But I believe that will change soon—for reasons I explain here.
Paid-up Project 5X subscribers can access my original writeup on this company here.
Regards,
Chris Wood
Editor, Project 5X