With its novel Tumor Treating Fields therapy that uses electrical pulses to treat cancer, Novocure (NVCR 3.47%) could offer new hope to patients and physicians. In this Motley Fool Live segment from The Pharma & Biotech Show, recorded on March 23, Fool.com contributors Taylor Carmichael and Keith Speights consider whether Novocure has the potential to emerge beyond a niche treatment option.
Taylor Carmichael: Novocure is a new modality for treating cancer. There are a lot of people who think it's not going to work, and there are people there are like this saved my life. It's been a while since I looked at Novocure, so I'm trying to remember and calculate.
Keith Speights: This is a company that they have the Tumor Treating Fields. They use electrical pulses.
Taylor Carmichael: You wear it on your head and I think it's saved people's lives. But like anything in the area of cancer, there's also, for some people, it didn't work. For some people, a cancer is so tough. It's so hard and so sad and depressing. I think if Novocure gets it and this becomes a widely accepted as another cancer treatment. I mean, it's a platform thing, if they prove their underlying technology.
Keith Speights: Which they have in brain cancer and glioblastoma.
Taylor Carmichael: But then we're not just proving it for the individual treatment, but proving it to the medical technology, proving it to doctors, to where they want to prescribe it all the time, you know what I mean? So it becomes talked about like chemotherapy, it gets talked about in that conversation and so it's not a niche. So I guess that's the way I would think about it, is it a niche that will blow up beyond the niche? That's why you would be in Novocure, to where it becomes one of those modalities that is widely practiced across the medical spectrum.
So that's really the question you need to think about and pay attention to, how are doctors, just ordinary physicians, your ordinary physician who is looking at you and thinks you might have cancer, are they thinking about Novocure or is it still in that niche that's off their radar? That's the big story for that stock going forward. It's not just if it does get approved by the FDA, but whether it gets that widespread market acceptance.
