Just one day after the ascendant biotech CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP 0.34%) reported its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 21, Chardan Capital analyst Geulah Livshits raised her price target for the stock to $112, suggesting that it could rise by 32% from its current price. The company is in the process of commercializing its first medicine, a gene therapy called Casgevy that it developed to treat beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease (SCD) as part of a collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Casgevy was approved for sale in the U.S. and European Union earlier this year, and that tends to make biopharmaceutical stocks go up by quite a bit.
But it hasn't yet recorded any revenue from sales. Instead, its net income of $89.3 million in Q4 was thanks to Vertex paying it a milestone fee worth $200 million. As the Casgevy launch picks up speed throughout the rest of the year, all eyes will be on how quickly the therapy is rolled out. Per Livshits' new price target, some are anticipating that the process is likely to go swimmingly.
More growth is in store
The Casgevy rollout will have the benefit of using CRISPR's recently bolstered balance sheet. Hot off of a stock offering earlier in February, it now has a total of around $2.1 billion in cash, equivalents, and saleable investments. Management is planning to submit the appropriate materials to regulators in Canada by the middle of the year in hopes of getting the medicine approved there as well.
Investors are also exposed to a couple of other catalysts from its mid-stage clinical programs in the pipeline. One of its oncology therapies for B-cell malignancies, CTX112 will provide a data update sometime this year, and another program, CTX131 for solid tumors, may provide one too.
With sentiment as high as it is right now, it won't take too much in the way of positive preliminary results to pump the stock up even further.
