Amongst the many headlines I clicked on while idly tinkering with my phone to mask how I was determined to ignore whatever boring thing my cousin was talking about at my family’s woefully nonalcoholic Easter celebration, I discovered April is Financial Literacy Month.
I vaguely recall the article being about as interesting as you might imagine.
Even Movember warrants more attention, considering it comes with a perk: We get to silently feel better about ourselves as a parade of pictures of hideously wispy hipster mustaches floods the internet.
Plus it has raised $559 million to date for over 800 programs in 21 countries for male specific diseases, cancers, and issues.
I’m sure we’re all very aware of the “_____ Awareness Month” bloat, and the efforts of every small niche issue advocacy group to add their own is undermining the whole point of having them in the first place.
Check out the Wikipedia list for April: Alcohol Awareness Month, Autism Awareness Month, Confederate History Month [Ed. Note: Not widely recognized by Yanks], Earth Month, Financial Literacy Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, National Child Abuse Prevention Month, National Poetry Month, National Volunteer Month, Occupational Therapy Month, Parkinson’s Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, National Donate Life Month (organ donors).
Didn’t read the full list, or wish you didn’t bother? Good. Point proven, and sorry for the waste of time.
The whole point of these designations is to bring something to people’s attentions that has widespread impact in spite of being largely unappreciated or unknown.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month did a lot for driving home the need for mammography, early detection, research, and treatments.
There is a small handful of people alive who haven’t celebrated Earth Month every month. Except for astronauts, we have spent all of our time directly on the surface of the Earth.
We are all aware of Jazz and many cannot possibly appreciate it.
Anyone who has ever eaten at a Pizza Hut is intimately aware of the fact that they should have been a lot smarter with their money, even if it meant going hungry.
In April, you can really only cite a couple of the designated “months” in the list above as having any real need for increased awareness.
One of them I left off of the list: Oral Cancer Awareness Month.
A Sleeper Issue
Now I’m not going to sit here and explain what we should be doing to protect ourselves from oral cancers. Instead, we’re going for the financial angle.
Any situation that is under-appreciated shows that the market is not efficiently using knowledge about it, and thus an easy profit opportunity exists for those who know what’s up.
Here is the situation as it stands:
Close to 45,750 Americans will be diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer this year. It will cause over 8,650 deaths and kill roughly one person per hour.
Worldwide the problem is much greater, with over 450,000 new cases being found each year.
Of those 45,750 newly diagnosed individuals, only an estimated 57% will still be alive in five years.
The death rate for oral cancer is higher than that of cancers which we hear about routinely, like Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and laryngeal, testicular, thyroid, cervical, and skin cancers.
In spite of massive improvements in treatments and outlooks for other types of cancers, these figures have barely budged over the last several decades.
Often oral cancer is only discovered when the cancer has metastasized to another location, most likely the lymph nodes of the neck. Hence the over 50% mortality rate within five years.
This is direct proof that the cancer is under-appreciated and that established detection and treatment regimes are woefully inadequate.
Now we have the makings of a biotech growth play in a virtually untapped specialty.
Timing the Market
To take advantage of this potential, we need to find something in the biotech sweet spot: R&D is done and the focus is shifting to sales and revenue growth.
Plus, we need to find an obvious source of improved patient outlooks and cost reduction to support widespread adoption.
Only one new diagnostic tool meets all four criteria.
Using a new blue light technique, oral cancers can be found in the earliest stages up to two years before the standard visual inspection, leading to survival rates around 95%.
This type of cancer screening only takes a couple of minutes to perform and adds little or no extra cost to your checkup.
Plus, the device that makes this possible costs a fraction of other devices on the market while dramatically driving down the cost of treating the cancer.
No wonder the World Health Organization has already recognized the “blue light” device, and the National Institute of Health and the BC Cancer Agency have backed it with $50 million.
And to make the financial angle for this story even better, the company that has this technique patent protected is transitioning from a long R&D phase into explosive sales growth.
With a market cap under $30 million, 485% growth from near nonexistent sales and marketing, and over 85% revenue and sales growth year-to-year, this company is in the right spot at the right time.
This company could get bought out at a hefty premium for investors by a major biotech company, or simply go it alone and see exponential revenue growth as dentists opt for the most effective and lowest cost solution.
This April, make sure your dentist is screening you for this, and check out Nick’s research on this company. Both will be hugely beneficial to you.
