NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Shares of biotechnology company Cytogen Corp. soared to a 52-week high for the second straight session Friday as enthusiasm for the industry's proteomics sector continued to drive the stock.
Nasdaq-listed shares of Cytogen (CYTO, news, msgs) touched a 52-week high of $14.313 in heavy trading - surpassing the previous high of $11.125 set on Thursday - as investors worked to lift the value of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company's stock to a level more in line with its peers, according to Wayne Hummer Investments analyst Michael Becker.
Also, the high trading volume and number of block trades suggest institutions have gained interest in Cytogen's stock.
Proteomics, the study of the interaction of proteins in the human body, is a discipline directly tied to the development of treatments for disease. It employs knowledge of protein creation derived from genomics, the study of genes.
Investors are pleased by the rapidity with which Cytogen is building its database of protein interactions and are reassessing the company's value, Becker said. While the analyst doesn't cover Cytogen for his firm, he publishs analyses on the company as the editor of the "Beck On Biotech" newsletter.
Cytogen is moving faster than the competition in the race to map protein interactions. Though the company wouldn't disclose how many proteins it has mapped so far, it has said its system will be able to log 200,000 protein interactions a month by mid-2000.
By comparison, the database of rival CuraGen Corp. contains descriptions of more than 10,000 interactions, while Myriad Genetics Inc.'s database contains about 50,000 and is growing by 75 proteins a day, according to the Feb. 4 issue of "Beck on Biotech."
"There's a rather large disparity between where CuraGen and Cytogen are valued" in light of that information, said Becker. "That's what people may be focusing on."
"If Cytogen is tenfold quicker, that's obviously worth a premium or parity," he added.
CuraGen (CRGN, news, msgs) hit a 52-week high of $179 a share in frenzied trading Thursday following news it had completed a protein interaction map for an entire genome, which will help in the process of identifying the protein interactions within the human genome. The news sparked a rally throughout the proteomics sector, carrying shares of Cytogen and Myriad Genetics (MYGN) higher.
CuraGen has a market capitalization of about $2.6 billion, based on Thursday's closing price of $163.563 a share and the company's 15.9 million shares outstanding. By contrast, Cytogen - which has 70.4 million shares outstanding - has a market capitalization of $893.2 million.
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WOW! If this is real, no wonder the volume and price has rocketed up. PLENTY of room to run.
Jim |
