Madrigal Pharmaceuticals Inc (MDGL)

[DMOST]

How a little 10-employee pharma company hit a whopping $4.4B market cap

While the company doesn’t even list its name or display its logo on the entrance of the shared office space it occupies in West Conshohocken, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals is anonymous no longer.

The 7-year-old company has experienced a rapid rise in its stock price and market capitalization, which at the start of the week was at $4.4 billion.

That’s billion, with a “b,” for a company with just 10 employees.

In the past year, the company’s stock has soared from $15.50 a share to more than $300, hitting a 52-week high of $325.98 last month. It was trading at $286 at the start of this week.

Fueling the growth is the company’s successful results from midstage clinical testing of its new method for treating nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, a liver disease that afflicts 20 million people in the United States.

“We were flying under the radar before,” said Paul Friedman, Madrigal’s CEO. “Now we are a known entity even though we are small because NASH is such a big area right now.”

Madrigal is competing with a growing group of biopharmaceutical companies, large and small, developing potential NASH therapies.

The company does not expect to begin the pivotal phase-III clinical trials — the last hurdle before seeking approval of a new medicine — for its experimental treatment, MDL-3196, until later this year or early 2019. Nevertheless, Madrigal attracted interest as a potential acquisition target.

Friedman said no deals are imminent.

“We have the money, a half-of-a-billion dollars in the bank, and the bandwidth to do the phase-III studies ourselves,” he said. “We are moving ahead in that direction. We also feel we have the responsibility to the people who have invested in the company to listen to incoming interest, and there has been a significant amount of incoming interest. We have talked to companies at a very early stage in relatively informal ways. We’ll see if any of that ever develops.”

Dr. Dina Halegoua-De Marzio, director of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s Fatty Liver Center, said about 20 potential treatments for NASH are in various stages of development.

https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2018/07/26/how-a-little-10-employee-pharma-company-hit-a.html?ana=yahoo&yptr=yahoo

GO MDGL

"PEACE"