UPDATE: Barrington Research Initiates Coverage on Opko Health with Outperform Rating, $6 PT

In a report published Monday, Barrington Research initiated coverage on Opko Health OPK with an Outperform rating and $6.00 price target. Barrington Research noted, “We are initiating coverage of Opko Health, Inc. (OPK) with an OUTPERFORM and $6 target based on our belief that OPK's experienced management team led by multi-billionaire Dr. Phillip Frost and long-term business partner Dr. Jane Hsaio, will commercialize several billion dollar product lines. The OPK team has successfully acquired, licensed and developed technologies that we believe will ultimately be transformative to medicine. These are: OPK's point-of-care diagnostic system (Claros), its next generation prostate cancer diagnostic test 4KScore (that we believe could reduce unnecessary biopsies by over 50%), a next generation biomarker discovery platform using synthetic peptoids enabling diagnosis of diseases such as early Alzheimer's and cancer, an orally delivered blood-brain barrier penetrable protease inhibitor called SR-3306 that has shown an ability to prevent neuronal cell death (apoptosis) in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, ALS and Alzheimer's, an orally delivered drug compound for Asthma and COPD that has demonstrated both anti-allergic and anti-inflammatory properties in a space where only inhalers and nebulizers have historically been available and a novel therapeutic discovery platform that has shown the ability to up-regulate proteins using Anti-Antisense principles called AntagNAT (which is likely meaningful for diseases where there are insufficient levels of important proteins in the body such as in diabetes and genetic disorders.)” Opko Health closed on Friday at $4.42.