Galmed Pharmaceuticals Ltd ( GLMD ) shares are surging Thursday after the company announced plans to broaden its drug development activities over the next two years.

What Happened: Galmed announced that it plans to expand its drug development activities by adding two additional programs.

One program aims to identify novel Aramchol-based drug combinations to overcome resistance to standard-of-care oncological treatments for patients with advanced colorectal and hepatic cancers. The other program is expected to help discover new methods to allow the development of a novel Aramchol-based drug combination targeting cardiac fibrosis.

The clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company said it plans to release new data from in-vitro and ex-vivo studies on the aforementioned programs during the fourth quarter.

“The conditions Galmed plans to focus upon in the coming years are major public health problems impacting millions of people worldwide and posing huge financial burden on health providers,” said Allen Baharaff, president and CEO of Galmed Pharmaceuticals ( GLMD ).

“SCD1 is a key enzyme that critically regulates many physiological processes, thereby promoting the progression of cardiovascular, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. We are leveraging on two decades of development of the most clinically advanced SCD1 inhibitor (Aramchol) to date as we broaden our drug development activities.”

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Galmed Pharmaceuticals ( GLMD ) is a very low-float stock with approximately 625,000 shares available for public trading, per Benzinga Pro. The company also had a market cap of less than $4.5 million as of Wednesday's close. Low-float, micro-cap stocks can be extremely volatile, which may help explain some of Thursday's surge.

Galmed’s average session volume over a 100-day period is approximately 1.711 million. Thursday’s trading volume has already crossed 16 million at the time of writing, according to Benzinga Pro.

GLMD Price Action: Galmed shares were up 53.6% at $10.60 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.