Due to my long-term approach to investing, my Top Pick for speculative investors for the coming year is MannKind (MNKD) — a stock I have chosen as a Top Pick for the past several years, recalls Nate Pile, editor of Nate's Notes.
MannKind currently retains all rights to its lead product, Afrezza — an inhalable form of insulin for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics; the company is continuing to make inroads in these markets against "the big three" insulin makers.
MannKind now has a second product on the market as well via a licensing agreement with its partner on the project, United Therapeutics (UTHR). This product (Tyvaso DPI) has only been on the market for a few months, but it is already showing signs of becoming a blockbuster for United Therapeutics.
Not only does MannKind get paid to produce the product (plus a small mark-up) for United Therapeutics, it also receives a royalty on all sales of the product as well.
In addition to these two products, MannKind also recently acquired V-Go, a small company that already has a presence in the diabetes space, and along with it providing a bit of bump on the revenue front, the company is also capitalizing on the acquisition as a way to help get its sales reps in front of more doctors.
Along with the above, a private company called Receptor Life Sciences has licensed the company's Technosphere drug delivery system to develop cannabinoid products for epilepsy and anxiety.
While the products being developed by Receptor Life are still several years away coming to market, they represent the potential for additional milestone payments and royalties as they work their way through the clinical trials process (and, knock on wood, commercialization at the end of said process).
Finally, now that the company has cleaned up the financial mess it found itself in after a relationship with Sanofi (SNY) turned sour several years ago, it is starting to develop its own pipeline of new products utilizing Technosphere, and these products will have the potential to either be partnered/licensed as time goes by, or perhaps held by the company all the way to commercialization as well.
To be sure, the stock is not the same screaming bargain today that it was for all those years when it was trading in the low $1s, but given all that is going on with the company these days, I believe there is still plenty of room to run before the stock will finally be back at something that more closely resembles fair value.
In addition, given just how far the emotional pendulum often swings when it comes to up-and-coming biotech stocks, history suggests that as the stock continues to climb, it will likely end up overshooting "fair value" by an equally large margin on the upside.
As a result, investors are encouraged to be patient about taking profits if/when they see the stock starting to climb. As has been the case for a number of years now, MNKD is considered a very strong buy under $5 and a buy under $10.
