Several of these companies have been off to torrid starts to the new year and one of them, Intellia Therapeutics (NASDAQ:NTLA) just gave investors a very optimistic look to the year ahead.
If you have not heard of Intellia Therapeutics, you are probably not alone. The biotech company based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts only recently gained a market cap of $4.5 billion, as well as the eye of savvy investors. The company is fairly new as it was only founded in 2014 and utilizes CRISPR technology or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of microscopic organisms like bacteria. If it sounds complicated, it is, but the scientific community has bought into it. The founders of the CRISPR technology just recently won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, so this could just be the beginning for the gene-editing industry.
Intellia revealed earlier this week that they expect to submit applications for two new experimental drugs to the FDA this year, which of course, can always turn into long-time recurring revenue teams for these firms. The applications are for Investigational New Drug status which, if approved, means the company can move forward with a clinical test trial. The two drugs in question are NTLA-5001 which is meant to be a treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, and NTLA-2002 which is meant to potentially treat hereditary angioedema.
Intellia actually has a treatment called NTLA-2001 that is further down the track to ultimate approvals. NTLA-2001 is a potential treatment for transthyretin amyloidosis, which is caused by a buildup of the protein amyloid and can cause organs to eventually fail. At this point Intellia is ready to gather patients for a Phase 1 clinical stage trial, so any positive results from these trials can result in a further bump to the stock down the road.
So is Intellia a buy after it has already surged by over 35% so far in 2021? If you are a long-term investor with a higher risk tolerance than this may be a perfect stock to add to your portfolio. With a small market cap and a healthy balance sheet for now, Intellia is exactly the type of company that can return exponential growth heading into the future. Two of Intellia’s rivals are also scorching hot to start the year in Crispr Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CRSP) and Editas Medicine (NASDAQ:EDIT) and already have stocks trading at higher levels than Intellia.
Of course if you are unsure of which company to invest in you can have a piece of the entire industry with Ark’s Genomics ETF (BATS:ARKG). No stock is going to continue to rise meteorically like Intellia’s has, but even if there are speed bumps along the way, this is the type of stock that could skyrocket in the next few years.
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