Strug­gling Sarep­ta bounces back as an­a­lysts cheer the first trick­le of rev­enue for DMD drug

Shares of Sarep­ta shot up 21% on Tues­day, buoyed by some en­thu­si­as­tic re­marks for the biotech’s first round of sales of its Duchenne mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy drug Ex­ondys 51, which were talked up by CEO Ed Kaye at the JP Mor­gan con­fer­ence. And a deal to kick off a gene ther­a­py re­search pact may have helped.

The sales fig­ure for Ex­ondys 51 didn’t amount to much. Sales hit $5.4 mil­lion for the first three months the drug was on the mar­ket, which fell be­hind Leerink’s es­ti­mate and gen­er­al con­sen­sus — pegged by Joseph Schwartz at $7.9 mil­lion and $6 mil­lion. But with more than 250 DMD pa­tients amenable to an ex­on-skip­ping ther­a­py seek­ing cov­er­age, and a pos­i­tive as­sess­ment that Sarep­ta could man­age the back­lash that’s grown among pay­ers, the biotech earned a 21% spike in its stock price.

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