NEW YORK (360Dx) – Four companies in the 360Dx Index saw their share prices grow at least 20 percent in June as the index rose nearly 4 percent overall month over month.
In total, 21 companies in the index saw their stock prices rise in June, while five firms' share prices retreated. The index beat the Dow Jones Industrial Average (+2 percent) and the Nasdaq Composite (+1 percent), but lagged behind the Nasdaq Biotechnology index (+8 percent).
Leading the gainers was NantHealth, whose shares were up almost 37 percent last month. Other major risers included Myriad Genetics (+27 percent), Enzo Biochem (+23 percent), and Oxford Immunotec (+20 percent).
GenMark Diagnostics (-9 percent) was the biggest decliner.
No news was good news for NantHealth in June. The company's shares had taken a hit in March after a story by Stat said a contract associated with a $12 million donation by the firm's founder to the University of Utah forced the school to purchase $10 million in services from NantHealth in return.
The deal provided the company with valuable data that was used to build a product for evaluating a patient's risk for rare and inherited disease, the news report said, and made it possible for NantHealth to inflate the number of test orders for its flagship product, the GPS Cancer test, that were reported to investors in late 2016.
Following the report, a number of lawsuits were filed against NantHealth.
Even with the sharp rebound in June, the company's share price remains about 40 percent below what it was before the Stat story was published.
For Myriad, June began on a bright note, as it reported that 17 insurers issued positive coverage policies for its EndoPredict breast cancer test. Later in the month, the company disclosed that it had linked a new long-term pricing agreement with UnitedHealthcare for a number of its diagnostics.
Enzo, meanwhile, saw an uptick in its stock price after reporting a 2 percent growth in revenues early in June. The day after the announcement, the company's share rose 13 percent. The month ended on a down note, though, as Enzo said last week that a patent that is central to a long-running intellectual property dispute was found invalid by a federal judge.
Positive developments on the legal and regulatory fronts drove up Oxford Immunotec's share price. June began with a favorable pretrial claim by a US district court in the company's patent infringement lawsuit against Qiagen, Quest Diagnostics, and Laboratory Corporation of America.
Later in the month, a French ministry announced it approved reimbursement from the country's national health insurance system for a number of tests, including Oxford's interferon-gamma release assays for tuberculosis screening.
GenMark paced the decliners, even as the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the firm's ePlex instrument and a respiratory pathogen panel. Investors greeted the news by selling off the company's stock, which dropped about 9 percent the day after the announcement.
The same day GenMark announced the FDA decision, it also said it would increase the size of a previously announced public offering of its stock. The company ended June by announcing it received CE marking for its ePlex BCID gram-positive and gram-negative panels.
Another June decliner was Exact Sciences (-3 percent), which had been May's biggest gainer. There was no obvious driver for the drop in its share price, however. Early last month, the firm agreed to sell 7 million of its common stock at $35 per share in an underwritten public offering.
