Why Guardant Health Stock Was the Picture of Health Today

Cancer-diagnostics specialist Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH) was a standout in the biotech sector on Hump Day. Investors cheered the company's news that one of its products made it onto a list of top innovations compiled by a familiar magazine. In response, they traded Guardant's shares up by almost 6%, making it quite the outperformer when matched against the S&P 500 index's 0.3% drop on the day.

One of the top innovations of 2024, says magazine

That magazine was the once-influential but still widely read Time, which flagged Guardant's Shield product as being one of its best inventions of 2024. The annual list compiled by the magazine features, in its words, "200 innovations changing how we live."

Time selected Shield, a colorectal cancer diagnosis kit, as one of the 200. Praising Shield for making the traditionally uncomfortable screening process "as routine as getting blood drawn," it pointed out that Guardant harnesses data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to produce the test's results.

The magazine added that the influential medical publication The New England Journal of Medicine said that Shield's detection-sensitivity rate was an impressive 83%. That makes it indisputably a fine weapon in the fight against colorectal cancer, which causes around 53,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and is one of the leading potentially fatal illnesses in the country.

In the press release trumpeting Shield's inclusion on the list, the healthcare company's co-CEO and co-founder AmirAli Talasaz said that he and his team "[are] honored to be a part of this prestigious list of leading innovative products that are making a dramatic difference in how we live our lives today."

A good Shield to wield

Inclusion on the list alone isn't going to vault Guardant into the ranks of top-specialty healthcare providers, but it will undoubtedly provide a free public relations boost to Shield. This product, which only won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in July, already has quite a bit of momentum and should be popular with the company's quite focused customer base.

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Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Guardant Health. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.