Over the last several years, I have researched hundreds of emerging biotech companies in various stages of development. I have written articles on many of them which I found the most interesting. I have personally invested in several of these.
Of all these emerging biotech stocks, Ionis (NASDAQ:IONS) stands alone for its combination of current financial viability with exceptional long-term growth potential. As discussed below, Ionis has headwinds over the near to midterm; however, they do not undermine the heady thesis of a biotech grower that is an excellent candidate for accumulation on weakness.
Ionis founders designed the company to provide disruptive techniques for drug discovery and commercialization
Ionis founder and current CEO, Stanley Crooke, often holds forth on the vision underlying Ionis' (formerly Isis) formation. He was in top form for Ionis' shareholders' meeting on 6/6/19. At the time, he reflected on Ionis' 30-year journey as follows:
"Ionis was formed to meet a very, very specific purpose... to create an advance, a new platform for drug discovery that would be significantly more efficient.
We focused on creating a set of molecules that had never been made before and never been considered as possibly drug molecules or medicine molecule, and these molecules reduced the genetic code directly to bind to a set of targets inside the cell that had never been considered as targets for medicines until we did it, and we call that technology antisense. And though we knew nothing about the technology in 1989, I was confident that if we could be successful in creating this technology, it would be significantly more efficient than traditional technologies for drug discovery."
The founding vision for Ionis was to disrupt prevailing techniques for drug discovery which were having a retarding effect on industry productivity. In addition to disrupting drug discovery techniques, Ionis
