So Long, Pharmacyclics...

(RTTNews) - It's a gain of over 6,000% for investors who bought shares of Pharmacyclics Inc. (PCYC) back in February 2010 and held them all these years - a handsome reward for long-term investors.

Pharmacyclics, whose flagship product is Imbruvica, is to be acquired by AbbVie Inc. (ABV) for $261.25 per share, which equates to a total transaction value of $21 billion. AbbVie has outbid Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), long consiered as the front-runner, to sign on the dotted line of the acquisition deal.

Imbruvica, formerly known as Ibrutinib or PCI-32765, received FDA approval for mantle cell lymphoma in November 2013, for chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients who have received at least one previous therapy in February 2014, for chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients who carry a deletion in chromosome 17 in July 2014, and for Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia as recently as January of this year. The drug is currently approved in more than 40 countries.

Imbruvica is being jointly developed and commercialized by Pharmacyclics and Johnson & Johnson's subsidiary Janssen Biotech Inc.

In 2014, the first full year of its sales, the U.S. net product revenue for Imbruvica was $492 million, and $56 million from outside of the U.S. The U.S. net product revenue for Imbruvica is anticipated to be approximately $1 billion this year.

Some analysts estimate peak sales of Imbruvica to range between $4 billion and $6.5 billion, as the drug's label gets expanded to include new indications.

When we first alerted our readers to PCYC in February 2010 , it was trading around $4. The second time we profiled this stock in July 2011 , it was trading around $11, and since then it has had a terrific run. And there can be no two opinions that PCYC is a success story where patience has paid off for long-term investors.

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