Biotech2k
Biotech Investor, AI-Driven Drug Discovery
The AI-biology narrative in biotech tools has no connection to fundamental growth. Illumina's two-year compounded growth rate is only 2.2%; the narrative is a made-up pump and dump. x.comÂ
Twist Bioscience looks more like a bubble than an investment case, even though it could benefit as AI multiplies drug candidates and pushes value up the biotech chain. It led the 2021 biotech bubble and still loses money, so buyers pay for the story, not the business. The same AI thesis is simpler and cheaper to own in vertical market software, through serial acquirers such as Constellation Software and Topicus, which gain more acquisition targets as software gets cheaper to build. x.comÂ
Genomics is quietly coming back to life. Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine with Merck succeeded in a Phase 3 melanoma trial, sending Moderna up almost 100% in a day. The ecosystem spans sequencing (Illumina, PacBio, Thermo Fisher, Agilent), gene editing (CRISPR, Intellia, Beam, Prime), gene therapy (uniQure), tools (Twist, Danaher, Qiagen, Bio-Techne, 10x), diagnostics (Natera, Guardant) and therapeutics (Lilly, Regeneron, Vertex, Moderna, BioNTech, BioMarin, Roche). x.comÂ
Twist Bioscience is not a bet worth taking at about 25x sales. @FredaDuan's pitch that AI drug discovery makes it a bottleneck trade, with Twist expecting triple-digit growth in AI-enabled drug-discovery orders in FY26 and again in FY27, is clickbait. x.com x.comÂ
Tempus AI is a second- or third-tier genomic lab whose AI story is marketing mumbo jumbo, and its management team are promoters. x.comÂ
Prime Medicine will trade on hype and fumes until it shows positive clinical data, likely not before sometime in 2027, because it is still a Phase 1 company. Its technology reads as almost too good to be true, but genomics has many promising players and it is hard to know now who will win, which favors a broad genomics ETF over a single name. x.comÂ
Genomics is likely one of the most important long-term investment themes of the next decade, as AI speeds how life's information is read, understood and edited. Picks: Illumina in sequencing; Tempus AI for AI with genomic data; CRISPR Therapeutics and Beam in gene editing; uniQure (high risk, high payoff) and BioMarin (more certain) in gene therapy; Natera and Guardant Health in diagnostics; Twist Bioscience and Thermo Fisher in tools; Vertex and Alnylam in therapeutics. x.comÂ