It has not been a good day for investors this Thursday. Worries about trade, the situation in Saudi Arabia, plunging oil prices, falling Chinese bourses (take your pick) has dissipated a lot of big gains from Tuesday.
The main biotech indices are down some two percent in Thursday’s trading session..
Here are two small biotech stocks garnering positive analyst attention this afternoon.
B Riley FBR reissued its Buy rating and $21 price target on Eiger BioPharmaceuticals (EIGR) today after that company release new trial data. Here is their commentary:
Yesterday after market close, 10/17/2018, Eiger BioPharmaceuticals announced positive Phase II data for pegylated interferon λ (PEG-IFNλ) monotherapy in hepatitis δ virus infection. We view these results as a positive event for EIGR shares, as it validates the firm’s platform opportunity in HDV, particularly the combination of PEG-IFNλ with prenylation inhibitor lonafarnib and CYP inhibitor ritonavir (LNF/RTV), currently in the Phase II LIFT trial guided to read out in 2019. We look forward to additional data from this study at the Diseases (AASLD) meeting but we remind investors that the key near-term value driver remains the start of the Phase III D-LIVR trial of LNF/RTV in HDV, guided to start in 4Q18. We thus reiterate our EIGR Buy rating and $21 price target.”
Eiger is up some 4% today in a very down day.
UniQure (QURE) is reiterated as a Buy and $30 price target with this brief commentary:
We note organ-specific promoters will help mitigate toxicity issues associated with off-target expression of transgenes. In addition, better promoters means potentially lower dosage of vector genomes will be required to achieve therapeutic levels of therapeutic protein levels.”
Last week H.C. Wainwright maintained its Buy rating and $48 price target on UniQure. The stock has quintupled since we gave it a positive review in the summer of 2017 from The Busted IPO Forum, but analysts still see upside. The stock has pull back some 25% recently and might be a good buy-write candidate for those interested in buying this dip.
