July 20, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
CHICAGO – Although the last year has not been kind to biotech and pharma stocks, especially when you consider the iShares Nasdaq Biotech ETF is off 30 percent since the beginning of the year, now may be a good time to take a look at some promising stocks.
Analysts at The Motley Fool, who are known to pick pharma stocks they believe will yield growth, have selected three stocks that will benefit investors over the long term—Celldex Therapeutics , Radius Health and United Therapeutics . The analysts predict these three stocks will be the biggest winners as far as gains are concerned at year’s end.
Shares of Celldex Therapeutics , currently trading at $4.60 per share, are far off the high-mark of last year, when the stock was trading at $26.39 per share in July 2015. The stock plummeted about 80 percent following the failure of Celldex Therapeutics’ cancer vaccine Rintega. The company ultimately terminated its research on Rintega, which had at one time earned Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the FDA for treatment of glioblastoma. Despite that major setback, Fool analyst Cory Renauer believes the company’s triple negative breast cancer candidate, glembatumumab vedotin, can turn the company’s fortunes around. He also cites varlilumab, an immune-system modulator that binds to a target on cancer cells, as a potential winner for Celldex. The company also has several other drugs in its pipeline that all have potential to boost the company’s bottom line, Renauer said.
Radius Health ’s stock is seeing a small boost this morning, currently trading at $40.02 per share. Analyst Brian Feroldi believes Radius Health has potential in its osteoporosis line. In May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted Radius Health’s New Drug Application for abaloparatide-sc, an investigational synthetic peptide for the potential treatment of postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. Last year, Radius submitted a Centralized Marketing Authorization Application for abaloparatide-SC in the European Union. With osteoporosis being a global issue, Feroni said the drug has the potential to generate more than $1 billion in sales should the drug be approved, which he said is likely.
Shares of United Therapeutics are currently trading at $113.81, although the stock has declined from a 2016 high of $131.87 per share in March. The company, which is developing drugs for pulmonary arterial hypertension, continues to see strong growth based on sales of its products Adcirca and Orenitram. Analyst Cheryl Swanson called United “the leading player in the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).” In addition to sales of the two drugs, Swanson said United is looking to expand approved use of its drug Tyvaso into a “variant of PAH projected to be worth about $3 billion to $4 billion yearly.” Not only is the company doing good things in PAH, Swanson said its pipeline also includes therapies for other medical problems, including the only FDA-approved therapy for the childhood cancer neuroblastoma.
