Caribou Biosciences: The Off-The-Shelf Revolution
The Original is now a Bubble Proxy
Disclaimer: This will be a “best ideas only” bio substack providing actionable, highly digestible and high conviction value to investors focused on quality not quantity. Nothing in this article (or substack) is considered investment advice and is solely the opinion of the author.
This is Part 4 of an ongoing series on ‘biotech bubble proxies’ — names with the platform architecture, peak valuation history, and clinical de-risking profile to become generational multi-baggers when the next biotech cycle arrives. For Part 1, please refer to my piece on AbCellera. For Part 2, please refer to my piece on Sana Biotechnology. For Part 3, please refer to my piece on Prime Medicine. For the original post on Caribou, please refer here.
The cell therapy industry has produced two of the most significant acquisition premiums in modern biotechnology. Gilead paid $11.9 billion for Kite Pharma in 2017 before a single commercial dose of Yescarta had been administered to a paying patient. Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $11 billion for Juno Therapeutics the following year on essentially the same calculus. The market had looked at CAR-T cell therapy, concluded that the ability to engineer a patient’s own immune cells to destroy cancer represented a generational therapeutic advance, and acted accordingly. Both acquisitions happened before approval. Both were vindicated by the clinical outcomes that followed.