3 biotechs that investors should buy next after Pfizer's $11 billion deal for cancer drugmaker Array BioPharma

Founded back in 1994, Alameda, California-based Exelixis has four drugs that are sold to treat various diseases around the world, including thyroid cancer, renal cell carcinoma, melanoma, and hypertension.

The biotech, which is publicly traded, has a market value of almost $6 billion and was recently added to the Standard & Poor's MidCap 400 index, which measures the performance of profitable mid-sized companies.

Last year, Exelixis reported revenue growth of nearly 90% largely due to an 85% increase in revenue from the drug Cabometyx, which is used to help treat renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of kidney cancer.

The recent Pfizer deal should be a "tailwind" boosting small and mid-size cancer company stocks thought to have good research data supporting their drugs, Stifel analyst Stephen Willey said.

Exelixis was one company that quickly came to mind, Willey said. Still, an investment might be difficult to rationalize because Exelixis might have a shorter duration of patent protection on its products, he said.

Another company that Stifel's Willey said could benefit from investor interest after the Pfizer deal is the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech Blueprint Medicines.

The biotech company, which has a market value of about $4.3 billion, develops drugs for genetically-defined cancers and immunotherapy drugs that use the body's immune system to fight cancer. Blueprint is also working on therapies for rare diseases.

One approach that the biotech is employing in cancer hones in on enzymes called kinases, which monitor the function of proteins in cells. These types of "kinase drugs" are already approved in the US, but they focus on less than 5% of known kinases, according to Blueprint. The biotech is working to make next-generation, better kinase medications.

Mirati Therapeutics could be on the radar of big drug companies, the Cantor Fitzgerald analysts say.

The company is based in San Diego, California and has a market value of $3.4 billion.

Mirati is developing a cancer drug that targets the KRAS gene mutation, which is commonly seen in cancers but has also been so hard for pharmaceutical companies to reach that it's been called "undruggable."

For now, "we think it is unlikely to be a potential M&A target at this stage given first clinical data is still pending," and expected in the second half of this year, the analysts said.

But investors are already intrigued by the drug, they noted, and plenty in industry are paying attention to the biotech.