Korean pharmaceutical and biotech shares are expected to have an upward trend with global academic meetings planned from September, an analyst said.
Although stock prices in the pharma sector have recently fallen amid growing uncertainties over drug companies’ capitalizing R&D costs, they will start to pick up with favorable prospects for the results of trials on various pipelines, the analyst said.
Sun Min-jung, an analyst at Hana Financial Investment, said in a report on Tuesday that top pharmaceutical shares began to rise slowly since the announcements of earnings in late July.
“They are expected to bottom out and make a rebound soon,” Sun said.
She attributed the positive outlook to a series of academic events planned for September. Since the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in June, academic events have been rare in the pharmaceutical sector.
Hanmi Pharmaceutical is to reveal interim results of the phase-2 trial on a lung cancer drug candidate Poziotinib at the World Conference on Lung Cancer in Toronto, Canada, from Sept. 23-26.
Genexine plans to announce the results of a phase-2 study on long-acting growth hormone GX-H9 at the meeting of the European Society of Paediatric Endocrinology in Athens, Greece, from Sept. 27-29.
The company is also slated to disclose the results of the phase-1b study on Hyleukin, immunotherapy, in patients with solid cancer at the annual meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) from Nov. 7-11 in Washington, D.C.
The analyst said other drugmakers’ recent announcements on R&D and positive issues in pipelines would also buoy up pharmaceutical shares.
“Although the share prices did not respond immediately at the time of the announcements, Kolon Life Science’s July announcement of signing a licensing-out deal for Invossa export to China, Genexine’s plan to study Hyleukin and Keytruda combo, and Hanmi’s expansion of indications of new drug candidate LAPS-GLP1/GCG have all contributed to the recovery of investment sentiment,” Sun said.
With JW Pharmaceutical’s licensing-out deal, investors will be able to witness development results of new drugs, she added.