Is Guardant Health Stock a Buy?
Many cancer patients undergoing treatment have impaired immune systems, so it's not a big surprise that some of them stayed away from clinic settings during the spring, when cases of COVID-19 were growing rapidly in the United States. Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), a company specializing in detecting cancer DNA circulating in the blood, saw a dip in clinical volume during that time, dampening results after the company more than doubled its revenue last year.
Guardant reported a revenue gain of 23% to $66.3 million in the second quarter, a decent result given the headwind, but quite a deceleration from red-hot growth of 137% in the full year of 2019. Guardant's revenue comes from tests taken by seriously ill cancer patients and drug companies conducting research in new treatments, and neither of those sorts of customers are going to put off buying the company's products for long. Will the company resume its torrid pace of growth as the pandemic threat subsides?
The treatment of cancer is still in the early phases of a sea change, as scientists design unique treatments for cancers with specific genetic characteristics. Precision oncology is increasingly reliant on understanding the genetic code of each patient's cancer, but that information is often difficult or dangerous to obtain through a biopsy of the tumor itself. Guardant Health is a technological leader in detecting tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream (known as ctDNA, or circulating tumor DNA), and the advantages of that technique opens up a huge potential market for the company, broken down into these three market segments.
Source Fool.com
