Stock Gumshoe

OK, so this one is cheating a little bit — I’ve already sleuthed out this recommendation, but this is a new way of selling it that I love.

You see, they’re now teasing this company with Katie Couric’s story — not about how she became such a prominent newswoman, or America’s morning sweetheart, or any of that, but about how she got a live colonoscopy on the air and shared the inside of her bowel with the world.

Beautiful.

So the sell here is that Rob Fannon of The Medical Investor tells us that the colonoscopy is one of the more avoided procedures — even with Katie’s push. After all, no one likes being probed just there, and I’m told it’s quite uncomfortable. I believe it.

So shouldn’t we all jump on a technology that can make the colonoscopy a more pleasant experience? Perhaps one that starts at the other end of the alimentary canal?

Indeed … and if you’ve been a reader for a while you might have guessed, the company being teased here is …

Given Imaging (GIVN)

I won’t waste your time with more on this one right now — I wrote it up last month when they were advertising it with a different tease. But you know, telling us that it’s the most profitable medical device stock you can buy isn’t the same as telling us about Katie Couric getting scoped … that’s just marketing brilliance.

Hope you’re having a great weekend, all. I’ll be getting to some more of the tougher teasers soon, there’s a huge pile in my inbox (Thanks for that, by the way, and keep ‘em coming!)

Rob Fannon and Dr. George Huang are analysts for a newsletter called The Medical Investor, and their publisher, George Rayburn, has a deal for you … sign up for a subscription, and you’ll get their new report, “The Most Profitable New Medical Device Investment in the World Right Now.”

Or of course, since you’re a friend of the Stock Gumshoe … you can just read the rest of this post to see what the company’s name is.

What’s the product? It’s a medical device, some sort of imaging product, and they give a few clues about the company:

“It’s safer than X-Rays, MRIs, or CAT Scans, and is already approved by the FDA. So far, this new technology has been used on 450,000 patients worldwide, with amazing results for certain cancers and many gastrointestinal problems.”

43 patents in many of the big industrialized countries.

Shares up 25% since last summer.

Mentioned in several volumes of Nature.

Has a $50 million marketing deal with Johnson $ Johnson.

So we put all that together, and what do we find?

Just a sec’ while I fire up the informatibilization device …

Ah, here we go!

This company is …

Given Imaging (GIVN)

This is a smallish Israeli firm, and their key product is the Pill Cam — which is just what it sounds like, a tiny wireless camera in a capsule that’s small enough to swallow (though just barely — it doesn’t look like a fun mouthful to me).

They use this and the associated products — receivers that you wear on your body, computers to quickly download and interpret the images — to help diagnose problems with the whole gastrointestinal tract. I’m guessing that’s things like stomach cancer, colon cancer, etc., but didn’t read too much about it.

The Nature articles on this, by the way (and I did read parts of them — that’s how much your Gumshoe cares!), were largely about the lead this little company had in this area of imaging as of a couple years ago — and how the big leader in endoscopes, the wired camera’s that you swallow or (picture discomfort), Olympus, with 70% market share, was caught a bit flat footed by the pillcam technology and is trying to catch up in that niche. Don’t know if they have yet or not, but certainly any competitor with Canon’s size and reach would be worth investigating if you’re tempted by this company. In related news, GIVN announced an agreement yesterday to collaborate with Fujinon, one of Olympus’ major endoscope competitors, so maybe that will help them as well.

Analysts have them becoming profitable this year, though they weren’t last year. Don’t know much else about the company, but if you do please share with your collegial Gumshoe readers with a comment here. I do know that I’d rather swallow a pill than a tube, for what it’s worth. Happy researching. And if you want to know what another investment advisor, Peter Stansberry, thinks is the hottest new medical device investment (it’s different than this one), that post from last month is here.