By
Godfrey Benjamin
February 13th, 2024
Gilead Sciences (GILD) stock closed yesterday with a 0.38% rise to trade at $80.25. WHO wants to involve the U.S. government in making remdesivir globally available.
Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD) stock is anticipating to gear up ahead after the World Health Organization (WHO) said it wants to engage the American government and also the Gilead company to make remdesivir coronavirus treatment more widely available.
The stock has been consolidating since mid-April when it hit its all-time high at around $85, only to retest it at the beginning of this month and fell short. At the time of reporting, the stock was trading at $80.02 in the pre-market (-0.29%). Yesterday it closed with a small rise of 0.38%.
Gilead has been among the leading biotech companies working on the development of a drug to treat the Wuhan-sprung virus. The WHO welcomed the recent data from the United States government-run clinical trials, which showed the drug appeared to be effective in reducing recovery times for COVID-19 patients.
“There are signals of hope there for the potential use of the drug,” said the executive director of the WHO’s health emergency program, Dr. Mike Ryan.
Gilead Remdesivir Gets a Go-Ahead Signal and Is Supported by WHO
On Friday, the U.S. FDA granted emergency use authorization for remdesivir to treat COVID-19 patients. This followed preliminary results from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. They showed that patients who took the drug recovered after 11 days, which is typically four days faster than those who did not use the drug.
However, the drug has not yet been approved to treat the virus. Several tests are lined up ahead including a solidarity trial from the WHO. “We are grateful that the company Gilead and the director-general had direct discussions at the highest level to ensure that we had access to the remdesivir drug to launch the solidarity trials around the world,” Ryan said.
According to officials from Gilead sciences, they expect to produce more than 140K rounds of its 10-day treatment by the end of this month. The company is also going to produce 1 million doses by the end of this year and several million in the following year.
As a result, it would leave the company to sort external help to produce more doses to cover more grounds, as the global population is in terms of billions not millions.
According to JPMorgan‘s Cory Kasimov, GILD stock has now reached the target price, hence the downgrade from overweight to neutral. However, according to a rating by InvestorsObserver, amid the coronavirus outbreak, Gilead stock scored an overall rating of 95, which is way much better than 95% of the stocks.