Leerink Upgrades Dyax To Outperform Ahead Of Pipeline, DX-2930 Advancement

• Dyax Corp. DYAX shares have jumped 61 percent year-to-date, but are down 22 percent since April 13 when they touched a high of $29.09.
• Leerink’s Joseph P. Schwartz upgraded the rating on the company to Outperform, while raising the price target from $25 to $36.
• Reliable revenue streams, strong scientific knowledge and advancement of new candidates into clinic are the positive aspects of the Dyax story, Schwartz noted.

Dyax is a biotechnology company that markets and sells Kalbitor [ecallantide], approved by the FDA in 2009 for the acute treatment of Hereditary Angioedema [HAE] attacks.

Analyst Jospeh Schwartz believes that Dyax is poised to leverage its technology platform, increased capital resources and biological expertise to develop new drug candidates that are proprietary to the company and can be commercialized easily.

Schwartz expects detailed presentations on the therapeutic rationale and strategy for the new candidates to drive greater appreciation for the platform value of the company’s monoclonal antibody technology.

“We believe the stock now has multiple drivers including stable Kalbitor growth, continued monetization of the Licensing and Funded Research Program (LFRP), the advancement of DX-2930 (Phase III initiation by YE15), and three early pipeline candidates emerging from the company’s phage display and antibody engineering expertise,” the Leerink report stated.

Three of Dyax’s candidates – DX-2930 for diabetic macular edema [DME], DX-4012 for thrombosis and DX-2507 for antibody-mediated autoimmune diseases – have significant opportunity.

Schwartz believes that the company’s stock is well positioned in the current market environment in which investors are likely to narrow their focus on “fewer de-risked market opportunities with defensible pricing power.”