If all it takes is a patent to get a stock soaring, there would be a lot of happy companies out there. Unfortunately, that's generally not the case. It was on Monday, though, for ITUS Corp. (NASDAQ:ITUS), as the stock hit a more-than-four-month high on no other news.
In fairness, the four-month high is somewhat relative given that shares had lost about 87% of their value across 2017.
At the opening bell, the San Jose, California-based biotech reported that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued inventors Dr. Amit Kumar, ITUS CEO, and John Roop, ITUS VP of Engineering, patent number 9,739,783 titled, "Convolutional neural networks for cancer diagnosis."
The patent protects ITUS's early cancer detection technology, called Cchek, being developed through its wholly owned subsidiary Anixa Diagnostics Corporation.
Dr. Kumar said he expects this first patent to be followed by addition ones that are currently pending.
In the simplest sense, Cchek in a series of uninvasive blood tests to detect cancer at an early stage, where treatment is proven to be the most effective.
Digging a little deeper into the science details how Cchek uses flow cytometry to measure and characterize specific immune cells in the blood, which is then analyzed through Artificial Intelligence to identify which patients have cancerous tumors. So far, Cchek has accurately detected 15 different types of cancer, including the most lethal and notorious to go undetected at early stages.
The market potential for such a test, considering 14 million people worldwide are diagnosed with canner every year, is obviously tremendous.
Perhaps it wasn't exactly the patent per se that got investors all jazzed up, but simply the fact that the novel technology is protected and put in the spotlight for the day. Shares of ITUS printed as high as $1.61 on massive volume and closed at $1.28 for a gain of 85.5% on the day.
