New Power for Ancient Names in Biotech

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Watching Jim Cramer last Friday on "Mad Money" reminded me of some of the darlings in the biotech and biopharmaceutical space with fascinating names and powerful momentum.

Gilead, for example, is a Hebrew word which means "Hill of testimony" or "mound of witness." As a child my family loved to sing an old spiritual song called "There is a Balm in Gilead." A "balm" is a healing or soothing substance, and there's a publicly traded company named Gilead Sciences (GILD) that's been working on some life-saving "balms" worth billions of dollars.

GILD is a biopharmaceutical company with a $51.40 billion market cap that discovers, develops, and commercializes human therapeutics for the treatment of life-threatening diseases all over the planet. Its product list reads like a "Who's Who" or "What's What" of the world of pharmaceutical products.

They include Atripla, Truvada, Viread, Complera/Eviplera and Emtriva for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in adults; Viread and Hepsera oral formulations for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B; Letairis, an oral formulation for pulmonary arterial hypertension; Ranexa, a tablet for chronic angina; Lexiscan/Rapiscan, a test that detects and characterizes coronary artery disease; Cayston, an inhaled antibiotic for the treatment of respiratory systems in cystic fibrosis patients; and Tamiflu, a capsule for the treatment and prevention of influenza A and B.

Their trailing-12-months revenue is more than $9 billion and they have a product pipeline in various stages of testing and development slated to make them billions more. Rather than repeat what Cramer said about this popular company, I'll show you the following chart and you can see for yourself that it's been experiencing major accumulation.

GILD data by YCharts
Since April 2012 the profit margin has ascended impressively as has the price-per-share.

On Monday, Oct. 15, some good news for Abbott Labs (ABT) cast more positive light on what appears to be coming down the pipeline for Gilead Sciences concerning its hepatitis treatments.

ABT reported that its experimental hepatitis C drug regimen cured 99% of patients in a middle-stage study with the most common and most difficult form of the disease. This news alone caused share of ABT to leap more than 3% to hit an intra-day, 52-week high of $71.99!

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