Biological Warfare
Sunday June 21, 2026
Disclaimer:
I did work (pun) in graduate school on glycoproteins. I would attach one protein to an AFM tip and another to a substrate and then measure the force required to break the bonds. This was part of larger study on cancer and cancer sensing.
So I am a dork.
I also used to work at a Children’s Hospital so I am used to explaining things to kids. It helps me to write stuff like this since it forces me to really think. Something I typically try to avoid doing.
We also own all of the stocks that I will discuss in this.
End of Disclaimer:
Imagine you are locked in a dark room wearing total sound canceling head phones. You are told there are two other people in the room. One of them will kill you if you are still in the room in 24 hours but will not harm you until them. (I know. Dark analogy.)
The other has the key to the door.
How would you figure out which person is which?
Well, you can’t talk to them because no one can hear anything. You can’t see them. Can you smell brass? Maybe. But what if the brass you are smelling is casing of a bullet the would-be murder has in his/her pocket?
It seems risky to base this decision on smell.
What you can do is just feel up both people until you find a key shaped object. This is how your immune system works.
Every cell is covered in various forms of biological velcro and immune cells feel around and try to identify what type of cell they are feeling up based on the types of velcro. Some velcro has long stems and small hooks. Some velcro is cork-screwed. Some velcro is shaped like a pretzel. Some velcro means a good happy cell. Some velcro means a virus or cancer. We call the class of molecules on the surface of cells glycoproteins and scientists give each unique form of velcro really boring names like HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, CD19, CD20 and my favorite CD47 the “please don’t eat me” velcro. Some of these glycoproteins are on a lot of different cells. Some are only found on certain cells for example CD19. More on this in a second.
Now you might ask how does a cell know if another cell is infected by a virus? Well, the velcro is always changing. A cell presents on it’s surface chemicals that tell what is going on inside the cell. So when a cell is infected by a virus its velcro shows a change.
These handsy hunter cells (which scientists call T-cells) are always feeling up other cells. When they find bad velcro on the surface of one they kill it.
They kill that cell dead. Sorry, they un-alive it. Scary words. This works great if you have a cold or the flu.
Sometimes these handsy hunter cells don’t know what velcro to look for. So another type of cell, when it finds bad velcro (usually a new bad velcro,) will put a post-it note on that cell and the handsy hunter cell whenever it feels a post-it note does it thing. And then that helper cell makes a memory of that new velcro to it can remember it. These post-it note labeling helper cells are called B-cells. And the post-it notes scientists call antibodies.
Now this system works - most of the time.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the handsy cells start killing perfectly normal cells. Whenever this happens scientists invent a funny name for it under the umbrella term auto-immune disease.
Sometimes the helper cell starts putting post-it notes everywhere causing the handsy hunter cells to start attacking healthy cells
The funny name scientists gave to this disease is Lupus.
One way to cure Lupus is to put a new cell into the body that hunts the B-cells. So they can’t put post-it notes on your liver and pancreas. This is what Cabaletta Bio (CABA) and Lyell Immunopharma (LYEL) are trying to do.
We are on our second trip with LYEL already.
You see the CD19 velcro only occurs on B-cells. So those companies are creating new cells that specifically kill B-cells by finding that velcro.
After killing all the B-cells the body starts over (in theory) and creates new B-cells that don’t have post-it note usage problems.
Another way (and a harder but potentiall safer way) is not kill all the B-cells just the bad B-cells. This is what Adicet Bio is trying to do by way of CD20.
You could just temporarily tell B-cells to stop with the post-it notes. This is what Cartesian Therapeutics Inc is trying to do.
Or you could dial down the stress. Going back to our dark room, what if you had 48 hours to figure it out? That seems less stressful. That’s what Artiva Biotherapeutics Inc is trying to do.
We are on round three with ARTV.
I fed this blog post into ChatGPT. It gave me an 8 out of 10 for the analogy which is a solid “B.”
I then told it to frame each drug company in terms of my analogy. It gets confusing keeping track of all of this. Hope this helps.
If I missed any stocks just cut-and-paste and do the same.
We own all of these. As I said before and will be adding as this space begins to show clarity what the best direction is.
As always, if you think there are spelling errors update your dictionary to the latest version. Happy speculation!
— AJ