Redmile Group Is Putting More Money Into Array BioPharma Inc. (ARRY)

Page 1 of 2

Jeremy Green’s Redmile Group has just acquired more shares of Array BioPharma Inc. (NASDAQ:ARRY). In a Form 4 filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Redmile Group disclosed purchases on August 11 and August 12 of a total of 532,500 shares of the biopharmaceutical company, at an average price of about $5.90 per share. Following these transactions, the San Francisco-based hedge fund owns 16.41 million shares, representing 11.75% of the company’s outstanding common stock.

cheerful pharmacist chemist woman standing in pharmacy drugstore

Redmile Group is a San-Francisco-based hedge fund founded by Jeremy Green in April 2007. The investment firm primarily invests in healthcare and medical technology companies by pursuing both turnaround and special situations investment opportunities. Green, the founder and portfolio manager at Redmile Group, had served as a managing director and portfolio manager at Steeple Capital prior to launching his own firm. Redmile Group listed holdings worth $1.11 billion in its March 31 13F filing with the SEC, with the healthcare sector accounting for 95% of the fund’s public equity portfolio value.

Follow Jeremy Green's Redmile Group

At Insider Monkey, we track hedge funds’ moves in order to identify actionable patterns and profit from them. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ large-cap stock picks historically underperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of seven basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. On the other hand, the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Index by an average of 95 basis points per month (read the details here). Since the official launch of our small-cap strategy in August 2012, it has performed just as predicted, returning over 123% and beating the market by more than 65 percentage points. We believe the data is clear: investors will be better off by focusing on small-cap stocks utilizing hedge fund expertise (while avoiding their high fees at the same time) rather than large-cap stocks.

Array BioPharma Inc. (NASDAQ:ARRY) is a biopharmaceutical company that currently focuses on the development of targeted small molecule drugs to treat patients afflicted with cancer. The company is currently running six registration studies on three cancer drugs: binimetinib (MEK162), encorafenib (LGX818) and selumetinib. The shares of BioPharma have gained slightly more than 20% year-to-date, but the stock has been on a downtrend since late-June. In the following article we’ll be discussing the main factors that might have influenced the performance of the stock throughout the current year.

Array BioPharma acquired the rights to two cancer drug prospects from Novartis AG (NYSE:NVS) and GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE:GSK) earlier this year. Novartis agreed to sell global rights to the experimental BRAF inhibitor encorafenib to Array BioPharma, and also agreed to return the rights of the cancer drug binimetinib (MEK162) to its owner and licenser, which is yet again Array BioPharma, after acquiring GlaxoSmithKline’s high-margin oncology unit last year. Having said that, the aforementioned two Phase 3 cancer drugs stand behind the surge in the company’s stock price at the beginning of the current year. In the meantime, the management of Array has asserted that the two innovative oncology products are on track for regulatory submission in 2016. To be more detailed, Array anticipates presenting additional preliminary data on binimetinib and encorafenib in BRAF melanoma patients at the 2015 European Cancer Congress (ECC) in September. Therefore, if the results from the Phase 3 trials are positive, the company could unlock a flourishing revenue stream as late as next year.

Page 1 of 2