Check up: dorsaVi leads ASX health gainers with 60pc rise

Here’s our fortnightly wrap of all the news driving ASX health stocks.

It was a fortnight of a bit of backward progress, with 65 small cap life science companies losing ground and just 51 gaining it. Another 12 companies were flat over the past two weeks.

The biggest gainer was wearable technology company dorsaVi (ASX:DVL), which saw its shares climb over 60 per cent on an investor update. The company, which makes wearable sensors for the clinical and workforce markets, has had a pretty good run in 2020.

It was also a strong fortnight for Cyclopharm (ASX:CYC), which gained over 50 per cent after a phase-three trial of its radioactive lung imaging agent met its primary endpoint, putting it on schedule for commercial sales in the US next year.

Rounding out the top three was Antisense Therapeutics (ASX:ANP), which got a boost after a US Food and Drug Administration ruling designating its drug candidate ATL1102 as a drug for a rare pediatric disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

This means that if ATL1102 is approved, Antisense would likely receive a priority approval voucher it could sell to a big pharma company for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just behind was Botanix Pharmaceuticals (ASX:BOT), whose shares climbed on a renewed government focus on antimicrobial resistance, something the clinical cannabis company is working on.

On the flip side, Recce Pharmaceuticals (ASX:RCE) fell after a $28m capital raising at a 16 per cent discount.

Allegra Orthopaedics (ASX:AMT), Regeneus (ASX:RGS) and Optiscan Imaging (ASX:OIL) all also lost about a fifth of their value over the fortnight.