When Thomas Edison died, or Einstein, or Dr. Feynman, for that matter... we knew what we had lost. The scientific community grieved. But when a scientist whose discovery might prove to be in any one or even all of their leagues died on Feb. 18 of last year, it felt as though the news went almost unnoticed.
Gunter Blobel was a molecular biologist. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. He had determined that proteins in any living cell have a sort of ZIP code system that guides them to where they need to go to take care of tissue, organs, and biochemistry. Blobel's mentor at Rockefeller University, Dr. George Palade, was a wizard with electron microscopes -- his work earned him the Nobel in 1974.
Blobel figured out that there are about a quadrillion cells in the human body, each containing about a billion protein molecules that are spun out of little cavities known as endoplasmic reticula. These proteins are all guarded by special membranes. He and a colleague hypothesized that each of these proteins also contains proteins that act as airport luggage tags, as his obituary in the Times put it.
It turns out this is indeed how cells work. Which means that's how the body works. And that's really something. Something very BIG.
The communication signaling system Blobel uncovered is fantastically complex. These are the mechanisms that, since, have been harnessed to make giant leaps forward in such areas as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's, leukemia, schizophrenia, HIV, cancer -- and a whole lot more. Because of this discovery, drug makers could send chemical compounds anywhere they wanted in the body to make the right proteins to perform.
What this represents is a new baseline in medical knowledge that will have profound effects. When Blobel showed up at Palade's lab in 1967, they didn't know much -- the previous breakthrough had been the electron microscope. Then Blobel used that tool to find something else. Researchers built on that to make the advancements that have been made in the past 20 years. And the smart kids doing research in the lab today have access to all that information in the palm of their hand.
So why should you care about this?
Well, you see, technology snowballs... And today, yet again, we find ourselves on the cusp of another generational shift in medicine -- one that could not only lead to longer, healthier lives for a lot of us... but one that stands to make a fortune for investors with the foresight to get in on the early stages.
A Look At How Far We've Come
Before we get into all that, let's first briefly look at how far and how fast medicine has moved...
Less than 150 years ago, a man named Charles Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield at a Washington, D.C., train station. The bullet didn't kill Garfield. But doctor after doctor showed up -- "doctor" decidedly did not indicate the training that it does today -- and examined the President, introducing the infection that did take his life. At that point, we even didn't understand germ theory.
But we learned.
In the mid-eighteenth century, we found a compound that came from willow trees that the world now knows as aspirin. In the 1930s, a 23-year-old medical student named Michael DeBakey invented a roller pump that would, in just two decades, change cardiac medicine forever. Chemotherapy was invented almost simultaneously as one of the first highly effective treatments for cancer, which was previously an automatic death sentence.
World War II brought, like all wars, a host of new treatments and procedures. Franklin and Wilkins discovered DNA. In 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray and Dr. David Hume at Brigham Hospital in Boston completed the first successful organ transplant, a kidney.
As Murray and Hume transplanted the kidney, Salk's polio vaccine ushered in another generational change that would culminate in the eradication of smallpox in 1980. The world learned the lessons of just how powerful an impact a drug could have after Thalodomide went on sale as an over-the-counter treatment for morning sickness in West Germany in 1957. The 1960s and 1970s ushered in the era of childhood vaccinations and in vitro fertilization of human embryos.
AIDS emerged as a public-health threat, and the pharmaceutical community endeavored to tackle the challenge. In 1997, GlaxoSmithKline introduced combivir, the first of the AIDS cocktails that would eventually allow patients to manage the levels of virus in the body and make a deadly serious disease a manageable chronic health concern.
The blockbuster drug Lipitor emerged, and dozens of other chemical-compound based treatments became the standard of care. In the early 1990s, Craig Venter succeeded in sequencing the human genome; scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep, just three years before the end of the millennium. The list goes on and on...
This Is The Most Lucrative Investment Opportunity Of My Career
Every year, 600,000 people die of cancer in America. 1.2 million have a heart attack. 30 million are walking around with diabetes.
But with personalized medicine, that's all about to change.
Now, we're not quite there... But it's coming around the corner -- and faster than you know. It'll take a lot of work, some trial and error, billions of dollars, and a ton of brainpower. But it's coming.
Genetic editing is bringing us to the doorstep of a colossal jump in our lifespans. Over the next decade, survival rates will soar for dozens of diseases, just like we already have now with certain types of early-stage cancer.
The point is, the science is getting figured out. And there are a few companies working in this area that stand to deliver massive returns for investors. But the most promising of all may be a company with first-mover advantage that I'm recommending exclusively to my Fast-Track Millionaire readers. Simply put, it is the closest of all to making it a reality.
Now, I can't reveal the name of that pick out of fairness to my readers. But here's my advice...
I just released a report on the breakthroughs being made in personalized medicine. Do yourself a favor and read every word of it. You're going to want to know about all of this in the months and years to come...
You can read my report at this link. Then, after you're done, do some more research on your own. Or better yet, consider joining us over at Fast-Track Millionaire to get the name of our top pick. We're also going to be covering this space a lot in future issues -- and you won't want to miss out.
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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
