Short of a market meltdown that sends every investor screaming out of anything with a bit of risk, biotechnology stocks tend to march to their own drummer, going up on the progress of drug trials and corporate partnerships independent of what the market does.
OncoGenex (OGXI) scores highly on both those metrics. Which is why I’m adding it to my Jubak’s Picks portfolio https://jubakpicks.com/the-jubak-picks/ today.
The company has two drugs for treating prostate cancer in Phrase II and Phase III trials. Prostate cancer is a big disease with 200,000 to 220,000 new cases a year. (There are roughly 2 million men in the U.S. now dealing with prostate cancer. Europe and Japan combined have twice that number.) Unlike many cancers, it is very treatable with a 100% five-year survival rate if the cancer is diagnosed early. The problem is that 30,000 men die of the cancer in the U.S. every year because they weren’t diagnosed early enough.
The race among drug companies is to find an effective treatment for those men who aren’t diagnosed early. The current standard of treatment is taxol, which is an expensive and highly toxic drug, which provides only about 2.4 months of survival after treatment on average.
OncoGenex Custirsen (OGX-011), now in Phase 3 trials, is an anti-sense molecule that, when administered with other cancer drugs, decreases resistance to the drug treatment. OncoGenex has just signed a partnership with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (TEVA) that includes a $60 million upfront payment and $370 million in potential milestones for the company OGX-011. OncoGenex anticipates finishing recruitment for its Phase III trial in 2012 with data in 2013. (This sets up a very interesting marketing angle since a therapy could combine generic taxol from Teva with OGX-011.)
The company’s second drug OGX-427 uses a second antisense pathway to also reduce resistance to drug therapies used against prostate cancer.
The company finished 2011 with $64.9 million in cash. Operating expenses in 2011 came to $27.8 million.
The stock has sold off a bit (3%) from the March 1 high at $16.20 to the today’s price (1 p.m. New York time) of $15.71 on March 14. I’m adding this stock to Jubak’s Picks today with a February 2013 target of $22.
Full disclosure: I don’t own shares of any of the companies mentioned in this post in my personal portfolio. The mutual fund I manage, Jubak Global Equity Fund http://jubakfund.com/, may or may not now own positions in any stock mentioned in this post. The fund did not own shares of OncoGenex as of the end of December. For a full list of the stocks in the fund as of the end of December see the fund’s portfolio at http://jubakfund.com/about-the-fund/holdings/
