UniQure’s strange summer has settled

The gene therapy company UniQure hasn’t announced what you’d call major news in months, and yet its stock price has bounced around all summer in what was a tidy illustration of how biotech companies are so often at the whim of things they cannot control.

It started June 4, when UniQure CEO Matt Kapusta bowed out of an investor conference, which, in the minds of Wall Street’s most magical thinkers, is a harbinger of a buyout, and thus shares rose. However, it soon became clear that Kapusta had a scheduling conflict of the non-multibillion-dollar variety, and things settled down.

But only until June 16, when Bloomberg reported that UniQure was considering a sale “amid interest from pharmaceutical companies looking to expand in gene therapy,” news on which shares rose. Then the narrative twisted. As all this played out, Roche seemed to struggle to get FTC approval for Spark Therapeutics, a UniQure competitor, and Wall Street wondered: Could that scare off the mystery moneychangers lining up to buy UniQure?

Cut to the present, and UniQure is right back where it started. The company, which remains independent, has gained and lost more than $600 million in value since June, all without announcing what you’d call major news.