Since bottoming near the end of 2008,
ISIS Pharmaceuticals (NasdaqGM:
ISIS) has been one of the hottest stocks in the first half of 2009. In fact, in just a few short months, the stock has exhibited all the tell tale signs of a powerful, interim
trend reversal. More importantly, a look at ISIS’s 3-year weekly chart shows that despite a dramatic correction in 2008, the stock maintained its long term, continuum with a swift reversal off of its 200-week moving average (shown below).
Profound bullish action in the first half of 2009 culminated in the stock’s recent acceleration from $15/share to nearly $19/share in advance of earnings last week. Unfortunately, exuberance seems to have over shot a bit and, despite a relatively strong earnings report, the stock has sold off in recent sessions. Could that spell an opportunity for bargain hunting investors to jump aboard?
What is Isis Pharmaceuticals?
Isis Pharmaceuticals is a drug discovery and development company which is the leading researcher in the field of
antisense therapies. Antisense is a treatment for genetic disorders which focuses on the use of specially coded nucleic strands to bind to mRNA within a patient’s cells. For those of you who remember high school biology class, mRNA is the nucleic acid which carries coding information from the nucleus to the ribosomes for protein synthesis. A
sense is a single sequence which codes for a particular protein. Antisense therapies focus on suppressing expression of a particular sense which effectively “turns off” particular genes.
Antisense drugs are a new class of pharmaceuticals and have the potential to change the way diseases are treated. Since these drugs are highly specific, targeting individual proteins being coded by RNA, they represent a large step towards more personalized medicine and theoretically should reduce unwanted side-effects in comparison to traditional protein or small-molecule pharmaceuticals.
