Geron, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals jump on good news from FDA

Shares of both Geron (GERN) and Madrigal Pharmaceuticals (MDGL) are soaring after receiving positive news from the Food and Drug Administration.

For Geron, an FDA advisory panel backed its blood disorder treatment. For Madrigal, the FDA approved its treatment for a liver disease known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH.

Yahoo Finance's Josh Lipton and Julie Hyman discuss the stocks' reaction in the video above.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.

Video transcript

JOSH LIPTON: Turning now to the world of biotech, Julie, we got a couple of different headlines here. We had-- Let's start with Geron. So that one was soaring today, right? Secured the backing of an FDA advisory panel for its anemia drug. Candidate investors, I mean, they obviously like it. Street does to. Stifle calling this overwhelmingly positive because the vote was so lopsided. It was 12 to 2. Expects the decision, they say, to pave a clear path to regulatory approval in June.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, I mean, when you're looking at these sort of developmental-stage biotechs here-- and this is-- this company doesn't have a product yet. So if it has this product, you can see why it is such an outcome that's either a yes-or-no outcome effectively here. So that's why you're seeing it go up so much here for this anemia drug. So you have that.

And then there is another example of this today, this same situation, with a company called Madrigal Pharmaceuticals. This has an experimental drug to treat a deadly liver disease, and it got accelerated FDA approval to treat patients with this particular type of liver disease, which is a nonalcoholic type of liver disease here. It's fairly expensive to get this, which is--

JOSH LIPTON: $47,000.

JULIE HYMAN: --about $47,000 a year, exactly. But analysts are pretty positive on this. It's called Nash by the way this disorder if you-- the acronym is it, is. And a bunch of other companies have tried and failed to come up with treatments for it.

JOSH LIPTON: Bristol Myers, Gilead. Although it's also interesting to see Viking Therapeutics was up at one point today too because they're apparently also developing a therapy for this same disease.

JULIE HYMAN: Right. But these-- these biotech stories are just so fascinating to me because everything is riding on these experimental drugs and whether they get through. And that's why you see such big-- I mean, not quite as big for Madrigal as it was for Geron.