A biotech stock like Apellis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:APLS) tends to live or die by a handful of conditions. One of these is having safe, working drugs to put on the market. When that part falters, share prices tend to as well. And despite Apellis’ reassurances over one of its latest drugs, its share price still took a serious hit, down over 19% in Monday afternoon’s trading.
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In particular, Apellis worked to reassure the public on its drug pegcetacoplan, more commonly known as Syfovre. Syfovre is used to tackle vision loss caused by geographic atrophy. However, reports noted that seven people who took Syfovre turned out to instead get a certain kind of eye inflammation that normally isn’t seen. Apellis issued a report noting that it wasn’t at fault, noting that neither issues in the drug’s manufacture or its makeup had anything to do with the eye inflammation.
Apellis moved quickly to investigate the handful of reports following Syfovre’s launch, and came back with a stack of results. While an investigation from the American Society of Retinal Specialists didn’t connect any particular batch of Syfovre to the inflammation results, it did reveal that the first symptoms took between one and two weeks to appear. Apellis also noted that it’s personally investigating an eighth case, 68,000 vials of Syfovre released so far and over 23,000 injections from clinical trials. While the comparative handful of cases is no doubt maddening, the speed at which Apellis is moving should be more reassuring than it’s proving to be.
Analysts, meanwhile, are largely undeterred. With 12 Buy ratings and three Hold, Apellis Pharmaceuticals stock is considered a Strong Buy. Further, with an average price target of $89.69, Apellis Pharmaceuticals stock also offers investors an upside potential of 238.%.