<p style="text-align: center;"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-442323 aligncenter" alt="pills" src="https://www.cheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Pills...jpg" width="640" height="427" /></p>
<p>One of the hottest stocks over the past year has been <strong>Galena Biopharma</strong> (NASDAQ:GALE). In 2013, shares of Galena rose by more than 190 percent as investors started to discover the potential that the company truly had. That red hot momentum has continued to start the new year with shares rising another 37 percent since January 1. With a slew of catalysts coming later this year and a stock market that doesn’t appear to be showing any signs of slowing, investors may be in store for one heck of a run.</p>
<p>Galena Biopharma has started attracting significant investor attention for several reasons. First, the company successfully launched Abstral in the fall of 2013. Abstral is an FDA approved fentanyl sublingual tablet used to ease the suffering associated with breakthrough cancer pain in opioid tolerant patients. A consulting firm, Decision Resources, estimates that market for “cancer pain drugs” will increase to approximately $3.7 billion by 2018. It will be interesting to analyze the sales trends for Abstral’s first full quarter on the market. Given the track record of the Galena Biopharma team, my hunch says that sales will be strong.</p>
<p>Abstral has another major benefit that seems to be missed by the investor and analyst community. That benefit is that Abstral sales may eventually be sufficient to fund the entire company’s research and development program. Given the depth and potential of Galena’s pipeline, that would be a huge relief for shareholders as they would no longer have to fear dilution.</p>
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