Amgen's New Lung and Colon cancer

Our most important role at Vestact is to closely monitor the stocks that our clients own. Pharmaceutical giant Amgen is held by most of our New York customers. Its share price has been drifting around lately, and closed at $183.17 last night. In fact, there is lots of good stuff going on at Amgen. It's just that some of their current big-selling drugs are reporting declining sales, and their newer ones are taking time to gain traction. Here are two stories that underline why this stock is a good one to own.

In recent weeks, scientists at Amgen revealed a significant breakthrough with a new drug for lung and colon cancer. Codenamed AMG 510, it targets KRAS proteins which act as the body's on/off switch in cell signalling. When it is mutated, negative signalling is disrupted and cells can proliferate wildly, often developing into cancer. For years, scientists said creating a drug to attack the KRAS protein was impossible. On Monday, Amgen's research team showed it had developed a medicine that shrank tumours in 50% of 10 early stage clinical trial lung cancer patients.

If AMG 510 can be commercialised fast, it will be a big seller. More on this story here: Amgen unveils its KRAS inhibitor in human clinical trials.

In other news, Amgen is offering to buy its Copenhagen-based partner Nuevolution for about $167 million (the two companies already had a joint-venture). Nuevolution focuses on inflammation, oncology and immuno-oncology and is the inventor of Chemetics, a patent protected DNA-encoded library drug discovery platform, which enables efficient discovery of novel small molecule drug candidates.



More about that deal here: Amgen announces a recommended public cash offer to the shareholders of Nuevolution