Medicine Made to Order
Daniel Stenson@stenson
−2.3%
since Oct 16
The idea
I believe medicine is heading toward personalized treatment, where a sample becomes a tailor-made drug in days rather than years, with a steady stream of new cancer and disease therapies arriving along the way. Rather than pick which drug wins, I own the toolmakers every developer relies on, weighted most heavily toward manufacturing gear since that is today's bottleneck, with smaller stakes in sample reading, biological building blocks, quality testing, and drug design.
What it owns
- These companies sell the equipment and materials every drug factory needs, so faster and more personalized manufacturing means more business for them. · Thermo Fisher ScientificIt sells drug makers the equipment, materials and contract production they need to make new medicines, so it gets paid regardless of which drug succeeds., DanaherIt makes bioreactors, filters and purification gear used to produce biologic drugs, sitting right on the slowest step today: actually making the medicine., RepligenIt makes filtration and purification parts that clean up a drug while it's being made, and those parts get thrown away and rebought with every batch., West Pharmaceutical ServicesIt makes the stoppers, seals and containment parts that hold injectable drugs, and most new cancer and biologic medicines are injected., AvantorIt supplies the chemicals, single-use bags and other materials that drug factories use up every day., Stevanato GroupIt makes glass vials, syringes and cartridges plus the machines that inspect them, the last step before a medicine reaches a patient., Maravai LifeSciencesIt makes key ingredients for mRNA medicines, the kind of drug that can be redesigned quickly for a single patient's tumor.41%
- Personalized medicine starts with reading a patient's DNA or tumor, and these companies do that step. · IlluminaIt makes the sequencers that read a patient's DNA, which is step one of turning a sample into personalized medicine., NateraIt builds tumor tests tailored to each patient's own cancer and uses them to track whether it's coming back, a working example of personalized medicine today., Guardant HealthIt finds and tracks cancer from a simple blood draw, a faster way to read the sample than a tissue biopsy., Tempus AIIt pairs patient sequencing with clinical data and uses AI to match patients with treatments and help drug makers find new ones., 10x GenomicsIt makes tools that read individual cells one by one, which helps researchers see exactly what's wrong in a tumor and design drugs for it.19%
- Personalized medicines like cell therapies and mRNA vaccines are built from custom DNA and engineered cells, and these companies supply those parts. · Bio-TechneIt sells the proteins, antibodies and growth ingredients used to grow and engineer cells, including the cells inside cell therapies built from a patient's own blood., Twist BioscienceIt writes custom DNA to order, and fast, cheap DNA is a raw material for designing and making a personalized drug., MaxCyteIt makes the machines that open up cells so they can be edited, a core step in building cell therapies from a patient's own cells.12%
- Every batch of medicine has to be tested before a patient gets it, and rapid turnaround only works if that testing gets much faster. · Charles River LaboratoriesIt runs the safety and lab testing that nearly every new drug has to pass before it reaches people, so more discoveries mean more work for it., Agilent TechnologiesIt sells the instruments labs use to test drugs and samples, and its recent acquisition adds software for reading tumor slides faster., Waters CorporationIt makes the machines that check every batch of a drug for purity before it can be released, and a medicine made for one patient means every dose is its own batch.12%
- Software and AI that design drugs faster could shrink the gap between reading a sample and knowing what to make. · SchrödingerIt sells software that designs drug molecules on a computer and also runs its own drug programs, which speaks to new discoveries ahead., AbCellera BiologicsIt searches huge numbers of immune cells to find antibodies that could become new medicines, then hands them to partners or develops them itself., Recursion PharmaceuticalsIt uses automated labs and AI to search for new drugs faster than traditional methods, a small, high-risk bet on accelerated discovery.8%
- Cash8%