Top 10 Pharma Investments ?

These days the one thing you hear all the CEOs of the AI companies - is “yes - this thechnology could be dangerous BUT we’re going to cure cancer and all diseases in my lifetime“

Let’s examine this statement for a little - these guys sure hope to live a very long life or there are very naive when it comes to curing cancer…

I remember when a person close to me was dying of cancer in the early 2000s I was thinking the same thing - by the time I am 50-60 cancer will be a thing of the past..

Well not really .. surely we had many breakthroughs - in particular immunotherapy - but people by and large still die of cancer very very often - if not cancer heart attacks or neurodegenerative diseases.

Now cancers are really nasty buggers - each is its own disease really - in fact what we call lung cancer is probably a collection of 20-30 diseases which still we don’t remotely understand properly (if we did we would cure them).

Heart attack is slightly better the recent advances of weight loss drugs will probably indirectly do more than all direct cures. BUT even there our lack of understanding is remarkable. See the last phase III trial of Novartis (Pelacarsen) where despite doing what they wanted failed to meet the primary endpoint (i.e. reduce heart attacks ). This is a big deal because for years we thought that reducing lipoprotein(a) (bad cholesterol) would reduce the risk of heart attacks - this trial failed to demonstrate cardiovascular benefit. We probably confused cause and effect or whatever … in short we don’t understand the disease.

And lets not start with Neurodegenerative diseases - there the “understanding“ is really poor - all drugs in the pipeline are really “hopes“

I guess this is better that using leaches like old doctors used to do few centuries ago

So why all this introduction ? In what company we are going to put our money into ?

I made a quick research using chatgpt (Astra ) and I found that there are some possibilities - but nothing really stands out - it’s all a mess. In the next few weeks I will continue my deep dive into the various Pharma companies and see how much we should really disinvest or maybe there is some hope ? Meanwhile check:

Behind the Work a brilliant new application that lest you share the work you do behind the scenes and share you research like I did before

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Originally published on Substack on 05 October 2026.