Touching a glimpse of glory

First just a few words about the market. I must say the Market God has really impressed me lately as there seemed no fear whatsoever regardless what was happening in the world. I'm especially impressed by how the market is reacting to the fast moving up of the long term interest rate with the 10 year rate just jumping to 3.2% within a couple of weeks from around 2.9%. Back in Jan this year, I have already said "it is almost a certainty that we will see 3% this year. " (see here) and I recommended to buy TBT/TBF to ride the trend. If you do so, you should be really happy! Although the market has basically ignored the rate increase thus far, be aware this long term rate increase will be very detrimental to the stock market at some point, especially when it shoots up to 4% and above. Certainly not any time soon to see a 4% rate yet but we may see it by end of next year. I guess the market is ignoring the increasing interest so far probably just because of that we are still a little far away from 4%, so why worry about it. But it will be wise to keep this in mind and we may start to see more volatility down the road if the interest rate keeps going up. Today's market plummet is just a small rehearsal! Now back to today's topic.

It is a historical date on Monday (Oct 1, 2018) that The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to cancer researchers James P. Allison (for CTLA-4) and Tasuku Honjo (for PD-1), whose studies led to the development of drugs that unleash the human immune system against the deadly disease. Given the revolutionary nature of their work that has opened a new era to have fundamentally changed the way in fighting cancer, these two scientists truly deserve what they have got. Just think about how many lives have been saved due to their historical research work!

In some way, I’m also touching a tiny bit of glimpse of glory (沾光) from them. While I have never been a research scientist in my life, I have been very interested in immunology actually and have been involved in some work in this field in my earlier days of career. Retrospectively, I must say I did have some vision to foresee a day when cancer may be treated with immunotherapy. Here is one of my published papers in 90s: Lin R., Tarr P.E., Jones T.C. Considerations regarding the use of cytokines in active specific immunotherapy of cancer. Vaccine Research 1996, when nobody was interested in immunotherapy for cancer! More significantly, I was even heavily involved and participated in the pioneering work that led to the first ever approval of the immunotherapy for cancer, ipilimumab or Yervoy. Allison's research led him to figure out how to block a protein on the T cells (CTLA-4), so that they could go after cancer. Research led to the creation of ipilipumab or Yervoy which was initially started to be developed by Medarex, a company eventually acquired by BMS. Yervoy was approved in 2011 that kick started a renaissance for immunotherapies. As such, Allison's often dubbed the "godfather of cancer immunotherapy."

I can proudly say I was one of the critical team members in developing this revolutionary and historical therapy! With that, I can brag to my grandkids that their grandpa has something connected to the Nobel Prize!😇😆