“Scientific progress goes ‘boink’?” ~ Hobbes, Calvin & Hobbes
Throughout history, economic progress has been driven by technological and scientific advances. Often, forward-looking investors can immediately see the clear path to profits from such innovation – for example, Fundstrat’s Head of Research, Tom Lee, began his career by being one of the first to see that mobile phones would largely replace landlines, creating enormous investment potential.
All too often, however, the path is not quite clear. In the 1980s, Nobel laureates Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert suspected their work on giant magnetoresistance would be useful, but they certainly did not see that their discoveries would pave the way for Apple’s iPod (AAPL -1.25% ) and modern hard drives. And nobody realized that Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and François Gros’s discovery of mRNA in 1961 would ultimately lead to vaccines for the COVID-19 coronavirus six decades later, while fueling the rise of companies like BioNtech (BNTX -1.69% ) and Moderna (MRNA -7.99% ).
It is precisely in this spirit of fortuitous discovery and greater-than-expected potential that the Market Intelligence team would like to highlight some of the scientific research and innovation that came to our attention over the past year in 2023’s final Signal For Noise. Some of the research here has the potential to drastically improve the human condition, some advances present obvious paths toward investment returns (though we make no judgment here on associated risk), and some merely fill us with admiration for what human creativity and ambition can achieve.
Human health
The research that caught our attention this year ranged from the imminent to the fantastical. The mRNA technology that led to the COVID vaccine is now being applied to cancer treatments, once again tantalizing us with the hope that a cure for cancer might be found in our lifetime. For example, Moderna (MRNA -7.99% ) and Merck (MRK 0.12% ) have developed a personalized vaccine to trigger an immune response to melanomas that is in Phase III clinical trials, while a BioNTech and Genentech team-up have a similar vaccine for pancreatic cancer in Phase II trials. Biotech companies are developing mRNA-based treatments targeting many other types of cancer as well.
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