Jack Prescott@JackPrescottX
- AbCellera is a founder led antibody discovery company. I believe they have built a Zero to One platform that will be able to repeatedly deliver antibody therapies with high-tech barriers to entry and low competition, which will deliver exceptional returns to shareholders over time if successful.
- CEO Carl Hansen is a physicist that has deep expertise in the core technology (microfluidics) that enables the company’s antibody discovery platform. He was mentored by one of the most prolific inventors in the field, Stephen Quake; who now serves on the board of the company. Quake serves as head of science at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Hansen was also mentored by legendary investor Peter Thiel for over three years during his time as a board member. Hansen has major skin in the game and owns roughly 21% of the company.
- Antibodies are one of the most successful therapeutics in modern medicine. They have higher clinical trial success rates than small molecules and peptides, along with better safety profiles, longer half-lives, and higher target specificity in general. They can treat a large variety of conditions such as cancer, autoimmune disorders, inflammation, viruses, neurological disease, and more.
- AbCellera has spent over a decade building out a fully integrated end to end tech stack that aims to solve every key bottleneck in the antibody discovery process. This end to end integration allows the company to collect data in-house throughout every single step.
- Importantly, AbCellera is able to conduct live, continual, single cell analysis at the scale of millions per discovery campaign, enabling them to obtain live functional data of how the antibodies are interacting with the target. In each campaign, they collect terabytes of multidimensional data. The enormous amount of data they collect from over 100 partnership programs over the years creates a flywheel of continual improvement in mining the immune system for antibodies.
- They own some of the earliest RepSeq patents in existence and leverage their single cell functional data as a map to search through the entire immune response, opening up antibody lineage trees to increase the company’s optionality in selecting ideal candidates.
- AbCellera leverages the immune system from Mother Nature as the ultimate computer to generate antibodies. Rather than using AI itself to generate these antibodies, AI is used to help scientists conduct a deep search through the immune system at the scale of millions of single cells to find the ideal antibody candidate. Because biology is infinitely random and complex, and Mother Nature has done the heavy lifting already, this is the superior way to apply AI. AI is used to summarize vast validated data and make it easy to understand and spot anomalies.. the 1 in a million antibodies.
- AbCellera importantly solved the biggest bottleneck in targeting GPCRs with antibodies: Finding a way to actually invoke an immune response against a GPCR-antigen to mine antibodies from. (see Tetrahymena). Historically, it has been virtually impossible to target GPCRs with antibodies. AbCellera is betting half of their internal pipeline and internally-initiated programs on this. They are highly confident in their abilities.
- Historically, the large majority (approximately 80% as of 2023) of T-cell engagers in clinical trials were using CD3-binding antibodies (the arm that binds to the T-cell) derived from just a handful of mouse antibodies discovered decades ago. Thanks to their platform, AbCellera has a panel of nearly 300 CD3 binders and nearly 500 CD28 binders (which amplify the T-Cell response from binding to CD3), which gives them far greater optionality and ability to fine tune their TCEs.
- The company was hand-picked by DARPA for the P3 program (a notoriously difficult USG agency to be picked by that takes moonshot high-tech bets) and delivered two antibody therapies during the COVID pandemic in world-record time that saved lives. Their history of working together dates back as far as 2016. I find this success under pressure during COVID and history of work with DARPA to be highly encouraging.
- AbCellera partners with industry giants such as Eli Lilly, J&J, AbbVie, Merck, Gilead, and more. Notably, both Eli Lilly and AbbVie expanded their collaboration with AbCellera within the past two years.
- The company switched from being a CRO to a clinical stage biotech and is now advancing their own internal pipeline. ABCL635 is a GPCR targeting antibody therapy to treat hot flashes and will have Ph.2 readouts in Q3’26, of which management notes has the potential to prove whether its likely that they have a winning molecule on their hands. Such success will force the market to reconsider how it values its 100+ partnership programs, which it currently assigns nearly $0 in value to, along with the other molecules in their internal pipeline.
- The company completed the buildout of its GMP facility in 2025 that makes the tech stack truly end-to end. This was partly funded by the Canadian government, which strongly backed AbCellera.
- The company has ~$655M of total available liquidity as of Q1’26, which is enough to support at least the next three years of business operations according to CFO Andrew Booth.
- I believe AbCellera is a Zero to One company that has the potential to become a biotech giant one day over the long run, fulfilling Carl Hanson’s vision of joining the ranks of companies admired by their peers such as Regeneron and Vertex one day. I look at the risks and unknown unknowns, and feel confident enough to have the company make up approximately 25% of my portfolio with a $3.93 cost-basis. I am thrilled to be a shareholder of this company and would like to hold for decades. I’m a believer.
For a more complete and in-depth picture, check out the article.
$ABCL