Why Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Stock Is Rising Today

Bellicum Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: BLCM), a clinical-stage biotech, saw its shares rise in excess of 11% today on almost three times the normal volume. The adoptive cell therapy company's stock appears to be getting a lift from the recent Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) $12 billion buyout of Kite Pharma (NASDAQ: KITE), as well as management's string of healthcare investor presentations scheduled for this month.

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Investors have been piling into adoptive cell therapy stocks in the wake of Gilead's buyout of Kite in the hopes of catching the next domino to fall in the chimeric antigen receptor space. And Bellicum, for its part, comes across as a particularly ripe takeover target as a result of its potent molecular switching platform, and rock-bottom valuation relative to leaders in the field like Kite. Kite, for instance, currently sports a market cap that's a hefty 24 times larger than Bellicum's.

Source: Fool.com