Embryonic Stem Cells: Which Stocks Directly Benefit from Obama's Decision?

The excitement of the executive order issued by President Obama allowing companies to receive federal funding for human embryonic stem cells research has brought a lot of new investor interest to the sector. All the stem cell stocks received a boost because the overall sentiment of the group became more positive. However, this post is to specifically address a question with these stocks that everyone seems to keep asking, "Which stem cell stocks directly benefit from this news?"

Early in the week, the answer to this question was not really all that important. To be honest, I don't think anybody cared as long as their stock kept going up. Now that some of the euphoria has died down, investors are more apt to gravitate to quality and relevancy as oppose to the "low floater". There are three stem cell stocks that I have found that directly benefit from federal funding opportunities:

Gern Corporation (GERN) - This stem cell stock received the go ahead for the first government-approved clinical trial testing human embryonic stem cells on people. Studies of this nature typically require multiple trials and can be very expensive to perform. Federal funding would soften the company's cash burn and lessen the need for partnerships and share holder dilution.

Advanced Cell Technology (ACTC.PK) - They have hundreds of patents and developed techniques to obtain embryonic stem cells while leaving the embryos functionally intact. Studies bolstering the significance of these techniques, which could act as the key cog in a potential scientific breakthrough, were requested to be funded by the federal government in 2007. However, they were denied simply due to a lack of political favor. Also, with this new funding available, new groups will be interested in doing research in the field. As a result of all the patents Advanced Cell Technology hold, they are nicely positioned for royalties.

BioTime, Inc (BTIM) - CEO, Dr. Michael West is one of the pioneers of the human stem cells industry. He was the founder of Geron Corp and also worked at Advanced Cell Technology. BioTime owns a subsidiary called Embryome Sciences, Inc. Part of their business involves marketing and selling new embryonic stem cell lines to universities and pharmaceutical companies. Fresh funding should supply potential customers of Embryome Sciences lots of cash to make this essential purchase.

2 comments:

  1. How does BTIM benefit? With Scll, there is No embryonic destruction. And if you rememeber 2 days after President Barack Obama signed a law that explicilty bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death." That means you have your stocks mixed up,

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  2. By the use of these stem cells, we can save human life and so it is very useful.

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