Queuing Up the Next One
The Next Pitch: What I'm Watching Now
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 2 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 here.
Every few years a platform company emerges that looks small until it doesn’t. The market assigns it a valuation commensurate with its current pipeline, systematically ignores the optionality embedded in the underlying technology, and then scrambles to reprice when a single proof of concept validates everything that sits downstream. I watched this dynamic play out in gene therapy. I believe I am watching it happen again, in a different modality, with a different disease, and with a founding team that has already built and sold one of the most important cell therapy companies of the last decade.
I am not buying this name today, and I will explain precisely why. However, I am watching closely enough that it warrants a full writeup, because the setup has a familiar shape — the kind of name that sits quietly at a fraction of its peak valuation until rates fall, biotech euphoria returns, and the market stops asking hard questions. At the top of the next XBI cycle, this is the sort of multi-bagger that gets priced to infinity. The science exists to justify it. The question is whether you are positioned before that happens or after.