NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 18, 2018 / Medical stocks Intuitive Surgical and Rigel Pharmaceuticals both saw big gains on Tuesday. Intuitive plowed ahead after crushing first quarter earnings estimates while Rigel announced positive FDA news.

RDI Initiates Coverage on:

Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
https://www.rdinvesting.com/report/?ticker=ISRG

Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
https://www.rdinvesting.com/report/?ticker=RIGL

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. shares closed up a little over 4% yesterday on nearly 25% higher trading volume the stock typically sees. It was an impressive quarterly earnings report that sent shares of the stock even higher in after-hours trading on Tuesday. Intuitive Surgical reported first quarter financial results that beat Wall Street's expectations. For the quarter, the company reported adjusted profit of $2.44 a share. Revenue for the period was $848 million, a growth of 25% from the quarter a year ago. Adjusted profit had seen a growth of 43% compared to the year ago quarter. Analysts had been expecting adjusted income of $1.99 a share and revenue of $767 million. According to Vijay Kumar, an analyst with Evercore, the quarter was solid and Intuitive Surgical "did not disappoint." He wrote, "This impressive top line was mostly driven by systems (sales), which contributed two-thirds to the revenue beat with systems coming in about 33 above consensus. The remaining one-third beat came from higher instruments and accessories consumable revenue."

Access RDI's Intuitive Surgical, Inc. Research Report at:
https://www.rdinvesting.com/report/?ticker=ISRG

Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. shares closed up 10.19% yesterday and saw even more gains in after-hours trading. Trading volume at nearly 4.7 million was significantly higher than the stock's average volume of about 1.9 million shares. It was last week that Rigel shares had broken out over FDA news that the company later explained was an error on its website. Well this week the news is no error. The company announced yesterday that fostamatinib has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a disease known as thrombocytopenia. The disease causes patients to bleed and bruise easily. Fostamatinib will be marketed as Tavalisse. The company's CEO Raul Rodriguez stated, "This regulatory milestone, our first product approval, validates the therapeutic effect of SYK inhibition in an autoimmune disease." The company plans to launch Tavalisse in the U.S. in late May. James Bussel, M.D., who was the principal study investigator on the FIT Phase 3 program has remarked, "Chronic ITP is challenging to treat because the heterogeneity of the disease makes it difficult to predict how an individual patient will respond to available treatments and not all patients can find a treatment that works well for them. The FDA approval of fostamatinib arms physicians with a new treatment option, which works via a novel mechanism."

Access RDI's Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Research Report at:
https://www.rdinvesting.com/report/?ticker=RIGL

Our Actionable Research on Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (NASDAQ: ISRG) and Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RIGL) can be downloaded free of charge at Research Driven Investing.

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