Chris’ note: As I’ve been showing you, one of the hottest sectors in the world right now is biotech. Our tech expert, Jeff Brown, is helping his readers make the most of it. He’s already handed them the chance to make 332% and 432% gains on biotech stocks he recommended.
And the gains are just beginning. Jeff is holding a free seminar all about a special way to play the boom in biotech tomorrow night at 8 p.m. ET. It’s called Timed Stocks Accelerated. He’ll share how you can maximize your profits using a strategy he spent five years refining. Sign up for free here to secure your spot.
Then read on below for more from Jeff on how a new breed of “thinking machines” is accelerating the pace of innovation… and helping find breakthrough cures for everything from cancer… to Alzheimer’s… to rare genetic blood diseases.
Chris Lowe: Longtime readers will know you’ve been urging your readers to get into certain tiny biotech stocks. You’re particularly bullish on CRISPR gene editing. What is CRISPR? And why is it so bullish for biotech?
Jeff Brown: Gene editing removes the bugs – or mutations – from our DNA. Our DNA is the unique code that makes us who we are.
So far, the most advanced form of gene editing is CRISPR. It’s like software programming for our DNA. It allows scientists to cut a genetic mutation out of our DNA code… and paste in a healthy, mutation-free version.
I’ve been writing about the revolution in gene-editing tech since 2016. What makes this particular moment so exciting is we’re seeing biotech companies harness the power of another tech megatrend I track – artificial intelligence (AI).
Chris: How do these two technologies meet?
Jeff: AI has revolutionized gene editing. Our genome is our complete set of DNA. At a high level, it’s a long string of code. That makes it perfect for AIs.
AIs are thinking machines. And they excel at pattern recognition. They can trawl through vast data sets looking for different pieces of code that relate to different illnesses.
Take pancreatic cancer. It kills about 400,000 people worldwide every year.
Imagine we have a large database of human genomes – a precise “map” of millions of human genomes. Pattern-seeking AIs could analyze the database and identify genetic sequences folks who get pancreatic cancer share. This allows researchers to link those sequences and pancreatic cancer.
Once the AIs figure out which segment of the genome is causing the disease, biotech firms like the ones I follow for my readers can then make therapies that “cut” out the faulty code and “paste” in non-faulty code. This stops the disease from ever happening.
Chris: You’ve spilled a lot of ink recently on two groundbreaking trials – one on a patient with sickle cell disease and another on a patient with beta thalassemia. These are inherited blood diseases that can be fatal if left untreated.
Scientists gave the patients in the trials genetic therapies that repaired faulty segments of their genomes.
Was that a one-off thing? Will these therapies keep them healthy forever? Or will they have to keep going back to the hospital for more treatment?
Jeff: The patients have been cured. And it’s permanent. There’s no need for follow-up treatments.
It’s not about just altering human DNA. It’s about changing it back to the way it was intended to be – without disease-causing mutations. This helps us achieve more stable, healthy selves.
Chris: What other areas are biotech companies targeting with these bleeding-edge technologies?
Jeff: Many of them are focusing on preventing and treating cancer. If we didn’t die from something else, we’d eventually die from cancer. As our cells age, they degrade. Eventually, they become cancerous.
But there are certain genetic sequences that increase the likelihood of that happening early in our lives. Biotech will allow us to eliminate the mutations that make certain types of cancer likely.
That’s on the preventative side. On the treatment side, a new area of research emerged last year using CRISPR genetic editing on T cells. T cells are immune cells. With CRISPR, scientists remove them from your body… and edit them to seek and destroy cancerous tumors without attacking healthy cells. Then they put these edited T cells back in your body.
Chris: Are there other diseases we’ll soon be able to cure?
Jeff: One of the hottest areas of research right now is Alzheimer’s disease.
We know there are genetic mutations that increase the likelihood of us getting Alzheimer’s. But last November, researchers revealed how a different genetic mutation may stop the symptoms of dementia – even if the patient has the high-risk genes associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Researchers found a woman in Colombia who was predisposed to developing Alzheimer’s in her 40s. But she went more than three decades without symptoms. No dementia. No confusion. No memory loss. Nothing.
It all came down to a rare genetic mutation that scientists were not aware of. This is huge. Now that we know the exact gene and mutation, scientists can target their research. They can gear therapies toward this specific gene.
Chris: The pace of change is mind-boggling. It feels hard to keep up, so much is going on.
Jeff: You may think the pace of change is fast now. And it is. But the speed biotechnology is advancing at is the slowest you and I will see for the rest of our lives.
Thanks to how exponential growth works, it will always be faster than it is today. I know of no other sector of the market like it. That’s why we’re seeing such insane gains in tech stocks lately.
You only need to look at the Swiss-based CRISPR gene-editing company CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP). I put it on the radar of our Exponential Tech Investor readers back in October 2016.
When we closed the trade in December 2019, CRSP was up 332%.
Or take Synthorx (THOR). It’s a cancer-fighting biotech company I recommended to readers of my Early Stage Trader advisory in October 2019. Just 41 days later, I issued a sell recommendation… for a 432% return.
We’ll see more change in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50. It will definitely be hard for us to get our heads around it.
Chris: And you say COVID-19 is presenting a unique opportunity for investors in this space.
Jeff: All of the early stage biotech companies that hit the “pause button” on their initial public offerings – or IPOs – during the worst of the lockdowns are now lining up to go public.
And thanks to the increased attention on biotech because of the pandemic, the returns on some of these investments will be larger than anything we’ve seen in recent history.
For this reason, I’ve referred to what we’re witnessing as an “acceleration phase” for biotech. More early stage companies are coming to market. The returns are larger. And they’re happening faster.
The investment potential here is unlike anything I’ve seen in the more than two decades I’ve been working in and following this sector.
That’s why I’d like to invite your readers to learn more about these investments tomorrow, July 15, at 8 p.m. ET.
If you’re at all curious how to profit from the current biotech boom, I encourage you to join me. You can reserve your spot right here.
Chris: Thanks, Jeff. I’ll be there. And I hope as many of our readers as possible will be there, too.
Jeff: You’re welcome, Chris. Anytime.