Caribou Biosciences is a clinical-stage biopharma, the most recent IPO’ed CRISPR company. It went public July 2021 at $16, reached a high of $22, and is currently trading at $9.16 and a market cap of only $555M. Note that this is a longer-term play.
Disclaimer: I own shares in CRBU, started my position at $10.xx and slowly averaging down.
What is CRISPR?
CRISPR is a groundbreaking gene editing technology that is tl;dr “find and replace for DNA”. It has the potential to cure previously-uncurable diseases like HIV, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer’s, various forms of cancer, and many others. Scientists have demonstrated cures or reversals of some of these diseases in mice. Note It is very early-stage in humans and will likely not reach the market for possibly up to a decade.
On CRBU’s website they state their technology has potential for the treatment of cancer in humans, and their farthest-along treatment is a Phase I clinical trial for non-hodgkin’s lymphoma.
They also will be presenting preclinical results on a therapy for Myeloma in the next couple weeks at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting. Note that preclinical results aren’t as big of a deal as clinical trial results and there’s no guarantee the results are good.
Comparison to peers
CRSPR stocks all boomed like crazy in 2021 (and have fallen significantly since).
The public CRISPR companies are:
CRSP: $5.20B market cap
NTLA: $5.24B market cap
BEAM: $3.88B market cap
EDIT: $1.39B market cap (used to be >4x this but they’re stuck in a patent war)
CRBU is only $550M and even if it can catch up to EDIT who’s been hammered by the patent struggles that’s a ~3x increase from here.
Note that all of these companies have been around for much longer, and are farther along in their clinical trials, having IPO’d 7-10 years ago except BEAM which is 5 years old. CRBU only IPO’ed 9 months ago.
Take a look at the stock charts of these companies once they got hot: CRSP ran from $40 to $200 in a little over a year, NTLA from $20 to $140, BEAM from $20 to $115, EDIT from $20 to $90. They all stayed low in price for a few years before running, but the point being that CRISPR companies can all run like crazy. CRBU is very new and has not yet, other than the initial IPO pop.
The Risks
-
CRISPR is still probably 7-10 years away to market
-
ANY company in the space having adverse effects in a trial will severely damage all the others (google “Jesse Gelsinger”)
-
There’s a bunch of patent war BS that these companies are waging against each other.
-
It’s fallen over 50% from its high (but so have the rest). All the CRISPR stocks have fallen over 50%+ from their highs a year ago but this one isn’t a wall street darling, maybe just because they are so new to have not proven themselves yet. To this point it’s notable CRBU was founded by Jennifer Doudna and Martin Jinek, who are two of the discoverers/pioneers of CRISPR. Doudna also won the Nobel in Chemistry for her work. They are currently on the scientific advisory board and bring a pedigree to the company.
It’s a speculative long term play, maybe with a slight short term run if the preclinical results are good (maybe, I have no idea), but every other CRISPR stock has 4x’ed and if this company can execute in the future it will likely go on a run of its own.