Ah, well. Better luck next time.
Novartis
That's one of the perils of investing in drugmakers with lung-cancer drugs in their pipelines. Pfizer
While lung cancer is indeed a tricky disease, that doesn't mean you should necessarily avoid the space altogether. There's money to be made if a company can hit the right spot.
Pfizer's crizotinib recently demonstrated clinical trial success in a small subset of patients with a specific mutation. And Celgene's
Novartis, on the other hand, was taking a bigger risk with ASA404, which it licensed from Antisoma back in 2007. Novartis did all the right things, including testing ASA404 in combination with chemotherapy agents, so that it merely had to improve the standard of care, rather than beating it.
But sometimes, drugs fail -- more than sometimes, where lung cancer's concerned. It's better to abandon this one and move on than to keep throwing cash after this castoff .
Jordan DiPietro thinks individual investors need to lick their wounds and get back in the game.