Nektar Therapeutics Stock Skyrockets Over 15% Today - Here’s What’s Fueling the Rally
Biotech investors are chasing massive gains as Nektar Therapeutics shares explode higher.
Market Momentum
The stock ripped more than 15% in a single session - a move that'd make even crypto traders blush. Suddenly everyone's a biotech expert, pretending they saw this coming all along.
Speculation Station
Traders piled into the name chasing momentum, because nothing gets money flowing like double-digit percentage moves. The classic retail investor playbook: buy high, hope it goes higher.
Reality Check
Let's be real - most of these buyers couldn't explain the company's pipeline if their portfolio depended on it. But when stocks move, FOMO beats fundamentals every time. Just another day in the casino-like world of biotech trading.
Skin in the game
That morning, Nektar published new data from a phase 2b study of rezpegaldesleukin, which targets moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, a skin disorder.
Image source: Getty Images.
The healthcare company said that a high dose of the drug achieved statistical significance on its primary endpoint, improvement in the eczema area and severity index versus a placebo over the course of 16 weeks of treatment. It also performed well in key secondary endpoints measuring a reduction of the disorder.
More encouragingly, Nektar found that participants who kept taking the treatment experienced even more profound effects. The biotech added that rezpegaldesleukin was generally well tolerated by the study's participants.
In addition to atopic dermatitis, the drug is currently being developed by Nektar for the treatment of severe alopecia areata, a disease that can result in hair loss. The next readout from clincal testing for that indication is expected in December by the company.
A new kind of treatment
In its press release on the atopic dermatitis trial's results, Nektar quoted its chief research and development officer Jonathan Zalevsky as saying that those results "demonstrate the potential of this new biology and the promise of Tregs [regulatory T-cells] as a therapeutic modality to treat inflammatory skin disorders."
