Winners and Losers - October 2nd - 6th (MYOG, SWKS, DDSS)

Winners:

Owning Myogen, Inc (MYOG) definitely made quite a few investors wealthy this week, because its share price jumped from $35.05 to $51.73 (or a gain of 47%). This substantial boost to the biotech company's share price was due to a takeover bid from biopharmaceutical giant, Gilead Sciences, Inc. (GILD) to acquire Myogen at a price of $52.50 per share. The acquisition of Myogen would serve as a good means for Gilead to diversify its product line, because the acquisition would allow Gilead to gain Myogen's two cardiovascular drug candidates, ambrisentan and darusentan. Furthermore, since these two drug candidates are already late in the product development process and have been met with glowing reviews about their effectiveness thus far, many analysts believe that these two new drugs will be big money makers; some even estimate that up to a billion dollars of revenue can be earned by those two drugs alone. This acquisition is expected to be finalized by the end of this year.

Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (SWKS) saw its share price rise up this week as it moved from $5.06 to $6.95 (or a gain of 38 %). The movement can be attributed to the semiconductor producer's decision to no longer pursue its baseband operations and will undergo restructuring in order to adjust its operational focus to more profitable business areas. Skyworks Solutions has not been very successful in the baseband market and has been incurring heavy losses. The company's upper management believes that it would be much more profitable to "partner with, rather than compete against, leading baseband suppliers such as Texas Instruments (TXN), Qualcomm (QCOM), Freescale (FSL) and Infineon (IFX)."


Losers:

Labopharm (DDSS) was definitely feeling the effects of negative market sentiment this week as it share price fell from $7.29 to $4.99 (or a 31.5% decline). While the specialty pharmaceutical company's pain killer drug, Tramadol, received an approval letter from the FDA, the letter did bring up that the drug possesses some unresolved issues. While management did not disclose what those specific issues were, they did say that they will look into the matter with the FDA and they are confident that the issues can be resolved without the need for more data. While most analysts are confident that Tramadol will be approved, most are just unsure as to how long this setback will delay the drug's release onto the marketplace.