Exact Sciences Stock Skyrockets on Liquid Biopsy News

This week, Genomeweb reported that UBS (which in part issues investment advisories) had downgraded Illumina's stock rating (here).  The major recent activity at ILMN was buying Grail, a well-funded company advancing tests for cancer detection.  

Today, at the Cowen Liquid Biopsy investment summit, Exact Sciences includes a slide that while 166 people need to be screened to detect just 1 colon cancer, a Multi Cancer liquid biopsy test could potentially be able to detect a cancer while screened only 30 people (19 page deck here).  I haven't heard the whole talk yet but it has a link on the Exact website here.  Cowen's next slide releases product-specific data.

On the last slide above, see the specific data from its clinical trials on a future product.  Note that data is broken out on the right by cancer - liver, lung, ovarian, pancreatic, and so on.  Note, of course, that you can't possibly screen 30 people to get 1 case of pancreatic cancer, the cancer itself isn't common enough.

Stock Shot Upward - Billions in Market Cap

Exact stock shot up by what CNBC is currently rating at 24%.  Since the market cap has been about $10B , that's about $2B-3B in stock market value. 

The five-day performance from Yahoo Finance is here:

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Note that while today's activity is very exciting, if you take a one year view, today's peak is still below past highs over $94 that occurred at several timepoints in the past twelve months:

Coverage of the day at Genomeweb, here.