Why Protagonist Therapeutics Is Skyrocketing Today

Shares of Protagonist Therapeutics (NASDAQ: PTGX) -- a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company -- are up by 111.6% as of 12:34 p.m. EDT on Friday. Protagonist Therapeutics released its fiscal first-quarter earnings report after the market closed on Thursday, and the company announced some exciting news regarding one of its most promising pipeline candidates, PTG-300.

In its quarterly update, Protagonist Therapeutics announced that it had chosen polycythemia vera -- a rare type of blood cancer that leads to an abnormal level of red blood cells -- as the first indication for which to run a pivotal study for PTG-300.

The company made this decision based on a Phase 2 study, the results of which Protagonist Therapeutics also revealed in a separate press release yesterday. During the study, six polycythemia vera patients treated with PTG-300 for up to 28 weeks experienced controlled levels of hematocrit, which refers to the percentage of red blood cells in the blood.

Source Fool.com