(Reuters) – Shares of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc soared to touch a record high on Wednesday, a day after the drugmaker revealed data on its triple combinations of cystic fibrosis (CF) treatments that wowed both analysts and investors. <\/p>\n
Vertex’s shares climbed 26 percent to $165.97, adding nearly $8 billion to its market valuation. They had earlier touched a life high of $167.00. <\/p>\n
Analysts said the data exceeded expectations, raised the bar for competitors and positioned the treatments to help up to 90 percent of patients with the life-shortening lung disease. <\/p>\n
Vertex already sells two therapies that can treat up to 40 percent of CF patients. Kalydeco and Orkambi brought in sales of $481 million in the first quarter. <\/p>\n
“Not only does this data set up well to reach a large majority of the CF patient population, it greatly increases the competitive hurdle while also enhancing the scarcity value of the company,” J.P. Morgan analyst Cory Kasimov said in a note. <\/p>\n
The data on Tuesday showed three different triple combinations of CF treatments significantly improving patient lung function in clinical trials. <\/p>\n
CF is a rare, life-shortening genetic disease affecting about 75,000 people in North America, Europe and Australia that causes progressive lung damage and loss of lung function. <\/p>\n
“The triple combo results came in an order of magnitude better than we, or really anyone, expected,” Baird analyst Brian Skorney noted. <\/p>\n
At least three brokerages raised their ratings on Vertex’s stock: Barclays to “overweight”, Janney to “buy” and Raymond James to “outperform”. <\/p>\n
Analysts are bullish on the stock with 21 out of 25 covering Vertex rating it “buy” or higher and the rest “hold”. <\/p>\n
Eight brokerages increased their price target on Vertex. The drugmaker’s median price target is $180, up from $129.50 in June. <\/p>\n
Shares of Galapagos NV, which is developing a rival CF treatment with AbbVie Inc, slipped about 4.5 percent. <\/p>\n
“Galapagos\/AbbVie’s planned path to the triple combo is not impossible, but faces a much higher hurdle as compared with Vertex’s triple combo strategy,” William Blair analyst Katherine Xu said in a note. <\/p>\n
Including Wednesday’s gain, Vertex shares have more than doubled this year. <\/p>\n
Reporting by Tamara Mathias in Bengaluru; Editing by Martina D’Couto<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Reuters) – Shares of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc soared to touch a record high on Wednesday, a day after the drugmaker revealed data on its triple combinations of cystic fibrosis (CF) treatments that wowed both analysts and investors. Vertex’s shares climbed 26 percent to $165.97, adding nearly $8 billion to its market valuation. They had earlier Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}