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Abivax S.A. ABVX

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The bet you're really making is that Abivax's one drug, an oral pill called obefazimod, becomes a standard treatment for ulcerative colitis, a disease where the lining of the large intestine stays inflamed and ulcerated. You're betting a pill this good at putting the disease into lasting remission can win patients away from the injections and harsher pills already crowding the market. Right now it is going well: in June the final-stage trials worked, with about half of treated patients in remission at 44 weeks versus one in ten on placebo. You pay about $8.4 billion for a company that still sells nothing, near the top of its twelve-year range against book value, and roughly eighteen times what analysts guess it could earn in 2029, its first possible profitable year.

Key data

Price$114.79
52-week range$69.81 to $148.83
P/E, trailing / FY29eNM / 17.6x
Price / book15.0x

ABVX · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$-6$35$75$115$156 Oct '23May '24Dec '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Abivax is a French clinical-stage company based in Paris and the US with essentially one product: obefazimod, a once-daily oral pill for ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis is a chronic disease where the lining of the large intestine stays inflamed and ulcerated, causing bleeding, urgency and pain, and patients cycle through drugs looking for lasting remission. Obefazimod is a small molecule that enhances a single micro-RNA called miR-124, a natural brake on inflammation (Vautrin et al., Scientific Reports 2018, DOI 10.1038/s41598-018-37813-y). That mechanism is unlike the JAK inhibitors, S1P modulators and antibody injections that dominate the market today, and it is a pill, not a shot. The company earns no product revenue: every euro spent is research, and every euro of cash has come from selling stock and, until this year, royalty certificates. The moat, if the drug reaches the market, is a differentiated mechanism protected by patents and a remission profile competitors cannot easily copy. The whole company rides on one molecule.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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