Is This a New Reason to Buy Pfizer Stock Hand Over Fist?
Despite Pfizer‘s (NYSE: PFE) recent struggles with falling earnings and a bid by an activist investor to unseat its leadership, the pharma juggernaut is still actively advancing its core priorities and giving investors plenty of reasons to consider buying its stock while it’s cheap.
With that in mind, here’s one new initiative that’s worth thinking about if you’re wondering about whether to make an investment.
Are You Missing The Morning Scoop? Breakfast News delivers it all in a quick, Foolish, and free daily newsletter. Sign Up For Free »
On Nov. 20, Pfizer announced that its strategic partnership with Flagship Pioneering, a highly prestigious biopharma venture capital (VC) group, had agreed on a new collaboration.
Per the agreement, one of Flagship’s portfolio companies, a private biotech called Ampersand Biomedicines, will work with Pfizer to potentially develop new medicines for obesity. Given that the market for weight loss drugs could be as large as $100 billion by 2030, there’s little doubt that there’s great potential for these businesses as they work together.
Ampersand’s technology platform aims to streamline the development of multi-component drugs that can localize themselves precisely to the appropriate physiological locations in the patient’s body, perhaps including targeted locations inside specific types of cells, and then deliver a high-impact payload for the intended medicinal effect.
Unlike technologies that are conceptually similar in terms of their goals, such as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), Ampersand’s technology can supposedly be implemented across a wide range of different therapeutic formats and drug delivery systems, utilizing everything from small molecules to biologics and even nucleic acids like mRNA.
In plain English, this means that the biotech could develop novel approaches to treating obesity and that those novel approaches might end up being significantly more effective than the drugs that are currently on the market or in development elsewhere.
But that’s an ambitious goal. This is not to suggest that its highly flexible multiformat approach is impossible, but in practice it’ll need to tackle a bunch of engineering issues beyond what would normally be expected. It would need to carefully calibrate the physical and chemical interactions between each drug format and each delivery system from scratch — and doing it correctly even for one combination is a very complicated and challenging process.
Leave a Reply