Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Management has acquired more shares of TrovaGene Inc. (NASDAQ:TROV). In a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bridger Management has disclosed purchases on July 17th of 140,000 shares at a price of $8.75 per share. Subsequently, the fund currently owns an equity stake in TrovaGene of 3.29 million shares.
Bridger Management is a New York-based hedge fund launched by Roberto Mignone in July 2000. The firm is a long/short equity hedge fund and pursues fundamental, research-oriented stock selection to construct its portfolio. Prior to launching his own shop, Roberto Mignone co-founded Blue Ridge Capital with John Griffin in 1996. Even before that, he had worked at Julian Roberson’s Tiger Management, which consequently puts Mignone’s fund on the list of Tiger Cub hedge funds. When Roberto Mignone stepped down from Blue Ridge Capital to start his own firm, he was joined by the healthcare junior analyst Blake Goodner from that firm. This might partially explain Bridger Management’s high exposure to the healthcare sector, which currently accounts for 47.34% of its public equity portfolio. The hedge fund has been successful in delivering attractive returns throughout its existence, generating an annualized return of 16% net-of-fees since its inception in mid-2007. The fund recorded a loss of 20% amid the financial crisis of 2008, but managed to get back on track in the following years. As stated by its most recent 13F filing, Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Capital manages a public equity portfolio worth $1.50 billion.
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TrovaGene Inc. (NASDAQ:TROV) is a molecular diagnostic company that is focused on developing and commercializing its proprietary diagnostic technology for the detection and monitoring of cell-free DNA in urine. To be more detailed, the technology this company is developing detects and quantitates oncogene mutations in cancer patients for better disease management. TrovaGene’s urine-based Precision Cancer MonitoringSM (PCM) platform will serve as the key growth catalyst for the company as soon as it gains adoption and is introduced among clinicians and other institutions. The company is currently engaged in 15 clinical collaborations that intend to evaluate the efficiency of this platform in detecting and monitoring different mutations related to pancreatic, colorectal, and lung cancers, as well as melanoma. It is worth mentioning that the PCM platform has already proven its superiority over tissue biopsy. In April of this year, TrovaGene revealed clinical study results that showed that the PCM platform enables detection of emerging T790M mutations in metastatic lung cancer patients with greater sensitivity than tissue biopsy. It might take quite some time until the company presents and publishes other clinical results for its studies using the PCM platform, but it is quite certain that potential positive results from new studies will surely assist the acceleration of the adoption rate for this technology.
On July 22, TrovaGene announced that its previously announced second public offering is closing. Thus, the company offered 4.6 million shares of common stock in the offering, which include the 600,000 greenshoe options that can be exercised by underwriters. Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Management is among the investors and institutions that purchased new shares of TrovaGene at an offering price of $8.75 per share. As a result of the underwritten public offering, the company raised roughly $40.3 million in net proceeds, before deducting underwriting discounts, commission, and other estimated offering expenses. TrovaGene asserted that the net proceeds from the offering will be used to fund the company’s research and development activities, as well as increase its working capital and cover other general corporate purposes. It seems that the company is confident in the success of the PCM platform and the capital raised through the SPO will assist it bringing the technology to the market.
To conclude with, we will briefly take a look at some financial figures of the company that might be of interest to investors. TrovaGene reported a net loss of $7.2 million or $0.33 per share in its first quarter of 2015 that ended March 31, compared to a net loss of $3.2 million or $0.17 per share reported in the same quarter a year ago. The increase in net loss was primarily driven by the increased operating expenses, which is customary for companies that develop pharmaceutical products, and by the change in the fair value of certain derivative instruments. Additionally, the company reported cash and cash equivalents of $44.0 million on March 31, compared to $27.3 million on December 31, 2014. However, this figure is not quite representative of the present date, as the company has definitely used some of the cash for its R&D activities, so we don’t know the actual figure at this point in time. Let’s not forget to mention that the shares of TrovaGene have skyrocketed by 132% year-to-date, which might be an indicator that the company is on the right track and investors feel very confident about its cancer detection platform. Within our database, Peter Kolchinsky’s RA Capital Management is the second-largest investor in TrovaGene Inc. (NASDAQ:TROV), holding 594,200 shares as of March 31, tailing only Mignone’s fund.
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