The Fastest Growing Cancer Company You've Never Heard Of

Clinicians have leaned on three primary weapons to battle cancer for decades -- surgery, radiation, and pharmacological therapy. Despite making steady progress in all three of these areas, nearly 600,000 deaths are attributable to cancer each year in the U.S. alone. Clearly, these a still a huge unmet need for new and improved therapies.

Enter Novocure (NASDAQ: NVCR). This small-cap medical device company has created what it believes to be the fourth modality of treatment. The company has spent the past 17 years championing the use of tumor treating fields, or TTFields for short, as a new method to fight cancer.

Like any new idea, the company has faced an uphill battle at converting doubters into believers. However, Novocure recently released some exciting clinical news that should go a long way to winning over the skeptics. What's more, the company's top-line is growing at triple-digit rates now that the vast majority of payers are on board.

I was recently afforded the opportunity to hold an exclusive interview with Bill Doyle, Novocure's Executive Chairman, to learn more about his company. Below are some of the highlights from our conversation. (Some quotes have been edited for clarity.)

The science

I started our conversation by asking Bill to briefly explain how TTFields work:

In essence, Novocure discovered that surrounding a tumor with TTFields helps to inhibit cancerous cell division. As a result, the tumor has a harder time growing inside the patient.

Wrapping your head around how TTFields work can be a big complex, but Bill gave a wonderful Ted Talk on how TTFields work a few years back that provides a much more detailed explanation of this process in action.

Next, I asked Bill to expand on some of the clinical advantages that TTFields hold over other currently available cancer treatments:

You are likely aware that traditional cancer treatments are infamous for having brutal side effects. Patients who use chemotherapy drugs can experience nausea, constipation, fatigue, anemia, and more. Radiation therapy is far from perfect, too, as it often kills healthy cells alongside cancerous ones, which leads to undesirable clinical outcomes.

The fact that TTFields have no systemic toxicity associated with is a highly desirable clinical advantage.

The opportunity

Novocure used its advanced knowledge of TTFields to create its first product. The company calls the device Optune, and it consists of batteries, electronics, and transducer arrays that are affixed directly to the skin near where the tumor resides. Once Optune is turned on, it surrounds the tumor with an electric field that inhibits its ability to multiply.

Novocure originally wanted to use Optune to fight lung cancer, but regulators instructed the company to start with brain cancer instead. That guidance caused Novocure to target glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM, which is an especially aggressive and deadly form of brain cancer. Roughly 12,500 patients are diagnosed with GBM in the U.S. each year.

As crazy as Optune sounds, it would up winning over regulators. Novocure secured its first FDA approval in 2011 as a treatment for recurrent glioblastoma. A few years later it was awarded an expanded indication to treat newly diagnosed GBM in combination with temozolomide (chemotherapy). Optune has also been given the thumbs up in Europe and Japan, too.

While sales of Optune have grown rapidly since launch, Novocure only recently released long-term data from its EF-14 trial showed that adding Optune to the standard-of-care chemotherapy treatment led to gains in overall survival rates at two, three, four, and five years.

More specifically, patients who used Optune and chemotherapy demonstrated a five-year survival rate of 13%, which was more than double the 5% rate observed in the group that only received chemotherapy.

While Optune is clearly having a positive impact on treating GBM, the company believes that this is just the beginning for TTFields. Here's what Bill had to say about Optune's potential in other cancers.

Given the company's belief in Optune's long-term potential, Novocure has funded a number of clinical trials in other forms of cancer with the hope of winning label expansions down the road.

These potential label expansion claims represent a truly massive opportunity for Novocure.  To put some numbers behind it, nearly 300,000 Americans are diagnosed with lung, ovarian, and pancreatic cancer each year in the U.S. alone. That figure is roughly 24-times larger than the company's U.S. GBM opportunity.

The business model

In addition to pioneering a brand new modality to treat cancer, Novocure is also attempting to blaze a new trail for the medical device business model, too. Rather than charge a big upfront fee for Optune and then bill for the use of each transducer arrays (which are replaced every two to three days), Novocure decided to roll all those costs into one package. Here's Bill's overview of how the company makes money:

In terms of cost, Optune's list price is $21,000 per month, which is in-line with the price of other cancer treatments. As a result, the key metric for investors to watch is what's called "active patients", which is the number of patients who are using Optune during any given period.

As you'd expect, this number has grown quickly over the last few years.

In spite of this strong growth curve, Novocure believes that there is ample room left for growth in GBM. In just the U.S., Germany, and Japan, the company estimates that its addressable market opportunity is more than 13,000 patients annually. That represents a more than 10x opportunity in just these few markets!

Financial results

As a result of soaring patient usage, Novocure's revenue has been rising rapidly. Last quarter the company's top-line grew by 167% year-over-year. What's more, the company's operating expenses actually declined by 1% during this same period. That shows that the company has reached enough scale to drive operating leverage.

On the other hand, Novocure is still very early in its growth cycle, which means that the company is still burning through cash. Last quarter the company set fire to $18 million. Thankfully, the company still holds more than $189 million in cash on its books, so liquidity is not an immediate concern.

I asked Bill Doyle to comment on the company's financial position. Here's what he said:

In other words, Novocure believes that its growth will be so strong over the next few years that company won't have to hit up shareholders for extra cash. If true, that's great news for investors.

Novocure is a buy

After speaking with Bill and visiting the company's U.S. headquarters, I must admit that I am quite bullish on Novocure's long-term potential. The clinical data that we've seen from Optune thus far clearly indicates that TTFields are the real deal, and the company's opportunity in lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer are truly massive.

While I certainly acknowledge that there are risks galore, I personally think that the potential upside is big enough to compensate investors for the risk that they are taking. In case you think those are empty words, you should know that I recently became a shareholder of Novocure myself.

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Brian Feroldi owns shares of NovoCure. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.