US Biotech posts small gain in May, says Burrill

It was a quiet month for US biotech with the Burrill Biotech Select Index recording a small 2.8% gain in May. However, it was a different story on the capital markets…although they finished strongly, with four straight days of gains bracketing the Memorial Day holiday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the month in negative territory, closing down 1.9%.

The Nasdaq Composite Index mirrored the performance of the Dow, dropping 1.3%. “It was an up and down month for the general markets,” said Steven Burrill, chief executive of life sciences focused investment bank Burrill & Co, noting that “investors have been spooked by high gas prices and the debt crisis in Europe.”

A leading gainer in the Select Index group was Affymetrix registering a 12.8% hike in its share price. The company announced that the US Food and Drug Administration had cleared the addition of new gene expression reagents as accessories to its GeneChip Microarray Instrument System for in vitro diagnostic use, which the company claims makes them the first in the industry to provide a comprehensive microarray-based clinical toolkit for diagnostic test development, signature discovery for companion diagnostics, and translational initiatives.