Dermtech (DMTK 3.76%) is an upstart healthcare company that's revolutionizing the way skin care is detected -- with a simple patch rather than a biopsy.
In this segment of "The 5," recorded on Nov. 23, Fool contributors Connor Allen and Jason Hall discuss Dermtech and how that skin-cancer-detection innovation could lead to multi-bagging returns.
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Jason Hall: Connor, how about you go next?
Connor Allen: Yeah, I got to say there's a few that are down a lot. It's PayPal, Upstart, DermTech. Those are three companies that I want to add to. DermTech is a biotech and it is very small now. [laughs] I'm sure the beating that it's taken recently, it's down. I think it's close to half billion dollar company now. It was up over a billion not too long ago.
Jason Hall: Little over 600 million.
Connor Allen: Little over 600 now. That's a company that has been absolutely hammered and I happened to buy it over a billion dollars. So that's unfortunate for me but I still believe in the company, they are trying to change the way that skin cancer detection is done. Typically, you get a biopsy which is very invasive and it takes a chunk out of your skin, send it off to a lab, and they do tests on it. Well, what DermTech is trying to do is they're trying to cut out that invasiveness where you get scars from all these biopsies that you might need and they are just putting a sticker. It's basically like a band-aid that you stick on mole or whatever looks cancerous to the dermatologist. They just came up with a new partnership with a telehealth business. Most iPhone cameras are good enough to where you can take a picture of something and a doctor can tell whether he wants to get it tested or not for melanoma and the doctor will look at that and then he'll ship a DermTech sticker to your house. This whole process is under the works for them still. But I do see that as being potentially really big for the business. Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the world. Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer which is what they're trying to deal with. But they have a bunch of different products in their pipeline including skin cancer, and percentage of what chance is this part of your skin? Is this going to have skin cancer in the future? They are trying to lay out things like that in their pipeline and there's a bunch of different forms of skin cancer and so they are trying to come up with a detection sticker for every single kind of skin cancer, not just melanoma like they have today.
Jason Hall: There's definitely some speculation here but we know they have a product and if they can increase their uptake with Derm, with physicians, that could be enormous. But once they start getting some momentum, Connor, I really feel like it could explode. It could really explode once they become the de facto product that doctors use for detection, it could be enormous.
