1 of Sarepta Therapeutics' Competitors Just Got Hammered. Will It Help the Stock?

In biotech, it's often difficult to tell whether bad news for one company will also be bad news for a competitor, or vice versa. Between using different approaches to therapy development, working with regulatory regimes in different countries, and targeting different patients within the same market, there are many combinations of possibilities that investors need to disentangle before even building a solid hunch about whether a new event will be benign or not.

For a biotech that's primarily concerned with rare diseases, like Sarepta Therapeutics, (NASDAQ: SRPT) one might assume that the picture is a bit clearer, but that isn't the case. Let's analyze the pitfall that one of Sarepta's competitors just experienced, and then determine whether it's something that could help or harm the stock over the next few years.

Sarepta's line of business is to develop and sell medicines that treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare, progressive, and ultimately fatal neuromuscular disease that starts affecting patients when they're very young. With sales of its four commercialized medicines, its trailing-12-month revenue is $1.1 billion, and its pipeline features a small handful of clinical-stage programs, so in the long term there may be more growth on the way. It isn't the only biotech targeting the market for DMD, however.

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Source Fool.com