Why Is Rolling Stones Guitarist Ronnie Wood, 75, Investing in Cancer Research Company?

Lung cancer is the second most common form of cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women in the U.S. SurvivorNet experts say. It forms when cancer cells develop in the tissues of the lung.

Lung cancer often doesn't cause symptoms until it has already spread outside the lungs, according to SurvivorNet's experts.

Wood joined the Rolling Stones as the group's guitarist in 1975. He is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer with both the Rolling Stones and the Faces. According to Forbes, the Rolling Stones has been active for six decades and sold more than 240 million records.

Wood's first cancer battle came about following a routine checkup with his doctor. A "cancerous legion" was found CNN reported. He had emphysema on the top lobe of one of his lungs.

In 2017, he underwent a five-hour operation to remove part of his lung to remove the cancer.

"Luckily, all mine was contained within the left lung, and I was fortunate enough to get shot of it, bang. There was none in the rest of my body, so I didn't require chemo," he told the U.K.-based news outlet, The Times.

He admitted he was a heavy smoker for 50 years. He went through 25 cigarettes a day before quitting the habit in 2016. The birth of his two youngest children helped prompt his lifestyle change.

WATCH: Medical oncologist Dr. Ronald Natale explains how smokers vs. non-smokers differ when it comes to lung cancer and its treatment.

After beating his first bout with cancer in 2018, Wood was diagnosed again with small-cell carcinoma in 2020.

"Sure enough, when I had recovered from the lung cancer, I was invaded by the worst kind of cancer. It's called small-cell," Wood said on an episode of Ireland's "The Late Late Show."

Small-cell carcinoma (also called small-cell lung cancer) is one of the main types of lung cancer and tends to be more aggressive.

"I had to have really heavy chemo and radiation and they said they'd given me a year's worth of medication in three weeks and my body just jumped to defense," Wood said.

The Biotech Company Ronnie Wood Invested In

According to Medical Marketing and Media, Ronnie Wood's investment into Ellipses Pharma comes just as the company also received the backing of West Coast Capital. Specific details on how much the rock star invested have not been publicly disclosed at this time.

Ellipses Pharma has invested "$150 million into its clinical drugs pipeline with plans to invest another $100 million, of which $40 million has already been raised." The company says it works with 230 oncologists to "validate the selection of new cancer medicines."

The company is currently in the midst of clinical trials to develop new cancer drugs that could potentially help treat thyroid and lung cancers. Data from its ongoing clinical trial using RET inhibitor EP0031/A400 which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 as an investigational drug. So far, the clinical trials indicate "significant tumor shrinkage across RET-altered tumors" according to Ellipses Pharma Global Head of Drug Development Tobias Arkenau.

RET inhibitors are a type of targeted therapy that helps treat RET-altered cancers such as non-small cell lung cancer and thyroid cancer. Targeted therapy is a type of treatment that works by identifying specific markers on tumor cells. These markers allow doctors to target specific cancers with drugs or other treatments designed to attack them. By doing so, they can reduce side effects while increasing efficacy and improving survival rates.

RELATED: The possible side effects of targeted therapy.

How Biotech Companies are Impacting Cancer Research

Over the last two decades, investments in young biotech companies have been crucial to bringing science to patients. Like pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies create medicines. However, biotech uses substances from living organisms to treat diseases. In cancer, “some biological therapies stimulate or suppress the immune system to help the body fight cancer” according to the National Cancer Institute. Immunotherapy is a byproduct of biotechnology in cancer. Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to target cancer cells.

“Using a patient’s own immune cells is a very complex way to treat a cancer,” Chief, Surgery Branch/Senior Investigator National Cancer Institute Dr. Steven Rosenberg explained to SurvivorNet.

 

WATCH: Immunotherapy has made a big impact on cancer treatment.

“One has to remove cells from the body, identify which ones can recognize the cancer, and give them back. And sometimes, you can’t find enough of them. We actually developed methods for genetically modifying a patient’s own immune cells by putting in genes to cause them to express molecules that would enable them to recognize the cancer in a new way,” Dr. Rosenberg continued.

According to Crunchbase, an online resource for information on private and public companies, “Of the top six pharmaceutical companies in the world ranked by 2021 revenue, four were founded in the 1800s. They're names you know well: Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, and Roche.”

In many cases, the younger and less established biotech companies take risks to develop and commercialize a particular approach to cancer. If their research and drug development progress far enough, the larger more established drug companies tend to buy into the biotech companies.

The cost of research and development alongside the commercialization of a product can run tens of millions of dollars. These exorbitant operating costs often prevent many biotech startups from growing beyond the drug-testing phase. However, it’s during this phase many biotech companies cash out.

"The reason they target that time to sell is because [trials] are expensive, but relatively inexpensive [compared to the rest of the process]," Todd Thomson, COO and CFO of Kairos Ventures explained to Crunchbase.

"And now you've proven you've taken some of the big risks away and you can get a decent price," Thomson added.

It's important to note that creating the drugs and testing them during trials can take at least a decade. Another harsh reality for biotech drug companies, many of their drug developments tend to fail.

A recent example of this involves Mirati Therapeutics Inc which began operations in 1995. The company invested in the development of Sitravatinib. The drug is an investigational spectrum-selective kinase inhibitor the drugmaker hoped would help treat non-small cell lung cancer. However, during clinical trials, Sitravatinib failed phase 3 of the study this past spring.

Ongoing Progress

Cancer research over the last 40 years has allowed experts to better understand how cancers thrive at a molecular level. Because of this greater understanding, better cancer treatments have emerged that are more tailored to individual patients. As mentioned earlier, immunotherapy has greatly impacted cancer treatments for millions of patients.

WATCH: Immunotherapy combinations and their ability to say lives.

"Immunotherapies for lung cancer, which won the Nobel prize in 2018, are actually preventing people from dying," Dr. Otis Brawley, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, previously told SurvivorNet.

"It is rare that in cancer epidemiology, that you can point to one treatment, and say that the overall death rate from all cancers is going down because this one treatment became available. In this case, we can do that," Dr. Brawley added.

The ongoing progress in cancer research and drug development ultimately means more hope for patients diagnosed with cancer or chronic disease.

“Immunotherapy is rather unique,” says Dr. Jim Allison.

Dr. Allison is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is also the Chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“We’re getting truly curative therapies in many kinds of disease– not just in melanoma but in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer,” says Dr. Allison added.

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