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About a month ago I singled out Sangamo BioSciences (Nasdaq: SGMO) as a top performing biotech stock. Since then the stock’s performance has been even more impressive.
Sangamo is up 36% in the last month and 62% since December 28. There’s a very good reason for that: Sangamo thinks it may have found the cure for AIDS.
The California-based biopharmaceutical company specializes in the research, development and commercialization of engineered DNA-binding proteins designed to develop novel therapeutic strategies for unmet medical needs. Last month the company announced the beginning of two clinical studies intended to develop a “functional cure” for HIV/AIDS.
During Sangamo’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the company’s vice president of research and development, Geoffrey Nichol, provided details on the ongoing study.
“We hope to create T-cells that will be both protected from HIV infection and capable of mounting an effective immune response to HIV,” Nichol said. “If successful, this approach would enable a functional cure.”
Of course, Sangamo isn’t the first company to claim it has found the cure for some notoriously hard-to-cure disease. Sangamo’s stock price will only continue to rise if the company actually proves that it has found a cure.
That would certainly help the company’s bottom line, one would presume. Sangamo reported a net loss of $6.4 million, or 12 cents per share, in the fourth quarter.
Still, as penny stocks go, Sangamo is intriguing. Few people know the company’s name at the moment. But if it has found the cure for AIDS, Sangamo may suddenly become a household name – and a stock market darling.