Andreas Halvorsen (Trades, Portfolio) added 2,011,404 shares to his stake in Kite Pharma Inc. (KITE, Financial), a Santa Monica, Calif.-based biopharmaceutical company emphasizing cancer immunotherapy products, on Sept. 25. The acquisition nearly quadrupled Halvorsen’s position.
Halvorsen, a founding partner and current CIO of Viking Global Investors LP, paid $57.02 per share in a deal that had a 0.43% impact on his portfolio. The stock sold for $63.3 per share by the time the market closed on Tuesday.
GuruFocus has given Kite Pharma a Financial Strength score of 5/10 and a Profitability & Growth score of 2/10.
Kite Pharma has a market cap of $2.66 billion and an enterprise value of $1.99 billion. It has a P/B of 7.1 and a P/S of 341. RS Investment Management (Trades, Portfolio) also has shares of Kite Pharma in its portfolio.
Kite Pharma announced Oct. 1 the peer-reviewed publication of nonclinical findings describing the discovery and characterization of a T cell receptor product candidate targeting HPV-16 E6. According to Kite’s chief medical officer, David Chang, HPV-16 E6 is “a viral oncogene [a potentially cancer-causing gene] that is causally associated with cervical and other HPV-related cancers.”
HPV is an abbreviation for human papillomavirus. HPV-16 and HPV-18 are thought to be responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases.
In August Kite confirmed that a cancer patient died during a trial of Kite’s cell therapy for a form of blood cancer. News of the death sent Kite’s stock into a downward spiral, and the stock lost more than 15% of its value, but Kite regained its lost ground within a few days.
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