Is BioNTech Stock a Buy?
The biotechnology industry is scrambling to develop a vaccine that could effectively stamp out the COVID-19 pandemic. This makes for a confusing landscape for investors trying to pick the eventual winners. Out of more than 130 vaccine candidates currently under investigation, there could be multiple winners, or there could be none. A successful vaccine could result in billions of dollars in sales.
But one thing the pandemic has done is to focus widespread attention on a few companies pioneering new approaches to drugs that could not only address this current threat, but also many other scourges. While Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) has been in the public spotlight for its lead position in developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, lesser-known German biotech BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) also has a drug-development platform based on messenger RNA (mRNA). BioNTech has begun dosing subjects in clinical trials for a pandemic vaccine, and its stock may represent a better value.
The development of mRNA drugs opens up potentially limitless new therapies, although the technology is still in its early stages and hasn't yielded a single approved drug to date. Messenger RNA is essentially the software of life, carrying the instructions for protein construction from DNA in the nucleus of every cell to ribosomes, where proteins are made. Drugs made from RNA can be engineered to encode for specific proteins with therapeutic value, turning patients' own cells into drug factories to treat their own disease.
Source Fool.com
