June 30, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
CHICAGO – Tripling an investment over the course of a year is the kind of return many people want to see. Two pharmaceutical companies had that kind of ROI this year, turning an $8,000 investment into more than $25,000.
Writing in The Motley Fool analyst Rich Duprey pointed to Cara Therapeutics and Clovis Oncology as two companies that saw a tripling of investments over the course of one year. Duprey outlined what made these companies so successful over such a short period of time.
Connecticut-based Cara Therapeutics has been on a roll, recently snagging the Food and Drug Administration’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation for its chronic kidney disease treatment CR845, a selective kappa opioid agonist. The FDA granted the designation for patients with moderate-to-severe uremic pruritus (UP) in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients undergoing hemodialysis. The FDA’s decision caused share prices to soar 16 percent in one day.
But that designation wasn’t the only good news the company saw last month. On June 21, the company saw another spike in share prices after it release positive interim data for a Phase III trial of CR845 as a treatment for post-operative pain.
Those bits of good news were able to send share prices up over the course of the year, turning an investment of $8,000 into $47,288, Duprey said.
Still, all good things must come to an end. If investors were still holding onto Cara stock, they would be losing much of those gains today.
This morning shares of Cara have plunged more than 31 percent following mixed results from a Phase IIb trial of oral form of CR845 in patients with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee or hip. According to Cara, CR845 failed to produce significant reductions in pain compared to placebo.
Shares of Cara are trading at $17.51, down from a June 27 high of $28.17.
Since the middle of May, Colorado-based Clovis Oncology has seen its share prices significantly increase from $45.93 to a high of $96.78 on June 22. Share prices have dipped slightly to this morning’s price of $92, as of 11:12 a.m.
Clovis stock has been soaring all months following reports from its Phase III ovarian cancer drug, Rubraca, a PARP inhibitor. The company said that Rubraca hit the primary endpoint of improved progression-free survival for each of the three trial populations.
PARP stands for poly ADP ribose polymerase, which is an enzyme many cancer cells are more dependent upon than regular, healthy cells are.
Rubraca is already approved as a third-line treatment for ovarian cancer, but the latest results were so strong that the company intends to seek FDA approval as a second-line defense against the disease. Clovis is also looking for approval of Rubraca as a maintenance treatment indication for all women with platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer who responded to their most recent platinum treatment.
Duprey speculated that if Clovis is successful with its supplemental New Drug Applications, the company “could have a big winner on its hands,” particularly as it takes on Tesaro’s recently approved Zejula.
