uniQure is a Railroad

The 2012 Vintage

This will be a “best ideas only” bio substack providing actionable, highly digestible and high conviction value to investors focused on quality not quantity. Disclaimer: Nothing in this article (or substack) is considered investment advice and is solely the opinion of the author.

There’s a particular kind of company that the market is structurally bad at pricing, and it’s the one whose real asset isn’t the thing in the headline. Everyone who looks at uniQure sees AMT-130 — the Huntington’s gene therapy, the 75% slowing of disease progression at thirty-six months, the FDA drama, the binary that everyone is waiting on. That is fair, and it is genuinely the catalyst, but it is also a profoundly incomplete way to understand what you are actually looking at. If you spend a week reading the company’s patent estate instead of its press releases, a different business comes into focus, and the closest historical rhyme I can find for that business isn’t a Huntington’s story at all.

It’s Alnylam — and specifically, it’s Alnylam as it existed in 2012, when almost nobody was willing to pay for what it would eventually become.

Let me build the case carefully, including the parts that argue against me, because this thesis only holds up if you are willing to carry the bear and the bull in the same hand at the same time.