Fire Up The Immune System To Fight Cancers And Boost Portfolios: John McCamant
Excerpts:JM: I'd like to talk about Sangamo BioSciences Inc. (NASDAQ:SGMO). Why is bluebird bio Inc. (NASDAQ:BLUE) worth five times more than Sangamo? Why is bluebird a $5.4 billion stock while Sangamo is a $875 million [$875M] stock? It doesn't make any sense when I compare the two.
What are the two companies' lead programs? Beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease. It looks like both companies have effective approaches to these diseases, which have very large market opportunities, yet Sangamo has probably one of the best corporate partners in the business. Biogen Inc. [BIIB:NASDAQ] has fully validated the Sangamo program and chose it, over bluebird's, in both sickle cell and beta thalassemia.
TLSR: Sangamo's stock is basically flat versus one year ago. What moves the stock from here? Could it be the Phase 2 data in HIV/AIDS?
JM: It could. Sangamo has an extremely broad pipeline, but the bigger picture is this: Who's going to be advancing these indications in gene therapy? We think the safety profile of Sangamo's zinc finger technology is more proven.
A lot of companies have been talking up a gene editing technology called CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats] for the last two years, but now there's a voluntary moratorium on CRISPR use in human studies. We're really making progress in changing genes inside of human cells. This is something that scares regulators-and it should-but that's why we like companies that have been around longer, created bigger safety databases, and that are coming out with multiple shots on goal. Gene therapy is cutting-edge science fiction, and it's becoming a reality.
TLSR: It is indeed. But I think the name Jesse Gelsinger will linger in the minds of regulators for quite some time to come.
JM: Yes, it will. It's important not to forget that young man's name; your readers will recall that a gene therapy experiment went wildly wrong and killed an 18-year-old patient who wasn't that sick to begin with. But I really think that with Sangamo, when investors add up the amount of years it's been developing its technology, the way it has built out its platform, how it's been validated, and its safety profile, they will understand that its valuation is quite low today. Not only does Sangamo have platform validation from Biogen, but it also has three preclinical programs with Shire Plc [SHPGY:NASDAQ; SHP:LSE] in hemophilia A, hemophilia B and Huntington's disease.
The other thing we know is that bluebird is not going to sail forward from being a $5.4B company to being a $20B company without bumps in the road. If nothing else, the risk/reward is unfavorable with bluebird versus Sangamo, which has a market valuation below $900M.
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