RE: SRA737- looking good!!18 Nov 2022 15:13
Just by chance there's a 2-page article in this week's MoneyWeek on immunotherapies.
"Immunotherapies are the most promising new cancer treatments since chemotherapies were developed in the late 1940s. These act by enabling the body’s immune system to identify cancerous cells and attack them. This is key, since cancer cells have the unfortunate ability either to evade detection by the immune system or to impede its response. The most important class of immunotherapies are currently checkpoint inhibitors.
We all have checkpoints as part of our immune system. They prevent an immune response from being so strong that it could destroy healthy body cells. Immune checkpoints come into play when proteins on the surface of immune cells (T-cells) recognise and stick to proteins on other cells. Unfortunately, these proteins on immune cells also bind to proteins on many tumour cells and therefore prevent the immune system from attacking the tumour and destroying the cancer.
Checkpoint inhibitor drugs block this process and hence allow T-cells to kill cancer cells. Because checkpoints are inhibited, the immunotherapy drugs can cause side effects such as skin rashes and inflammation of various organs in the body. The side-effects depend on how healthy you are, the type of cancer and the type of checkpoint inhibitor used."
and
"The global cancer treatment market was worth $135.5bn in 2020, and immunotherapy drugs accounted for 63% of it. The cancer immunotherapy market itself was valued at $85.6bn in 2020 and is expected to rise to an estimated $309.7bn by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate of 14.1% between 2021 and 2030.
Immunotherapy is the main growth driver in the cancer drug market. The five most common cancers are lung, breast, colorectal, melanoma and prostate cancer. The main companies are, in alphabetical order, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Roche. Since the field of immunotherapies is developing rapidly, it is useful to pick out companies with the largest percentage of their 2021 sales in oncology. These firms are likely to be giving strong emphasis to the development of new cancer drugs and could be long-term winners."
Keep the faith, peeps!
Sign In
Follow the stocks
