CUE — Cue Biopharma, Inc.

Company context · prepared 2026-08-19 · company sweep 2026-08-19 · USD · framework v5.10.3

How to read this. Written for a reader who has not studied pharmacology or finance. General terms are defined once in framework/04-glossary.md. Tags: [VERIFIED — source] / [UNVERIFIED] / [WEB ESTIMATE — source, date].

Program analyses for this company are the sub-folders listed in C.2.

C.0 Company-tier coverage — CLEARED

C.1 What the company is

Cue Biopharma is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in Boston, Massachusetts, with no product revenue and no approved product [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_info 2026-08-19]. Its only income is collaboration payments from partners, which came to $13.563 million in the first half of 2026 [VERIFIED — 10-Q for the period ended 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14].

The company that exists today is roughly four months old. Through early 2026 Cue was an oncology company built on its own “Immuno-STAT” protein-engineering platform, and its shares traded below $0.20 [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_press_releases: a 2025-12-19 public offering was priced at $0.28 per share]. In April 2026 it did four things in the space of ten days: a 1-for-30 reverse stock split effective 2026-04-23, a new chief executive, an in-licensed clinical-stage antibody called CUE-221, and a $30 million financing [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_press_releases 2026-04-22, 2026-04-30, 2026-05-01; 10-Q]. A reverse stock split replaces every thirty existing shares with one share, which multiplies the quoted price by thirty without changing what a holder owns; it is normally done to regain a stock exchange’s minimum price requirement, and the company said so [VERIFIED — press release 2026-04-22, “sets 1-for-30 reverse split to support Nasdaq bid”].

It is effectively a single-asset company. CUE-221 is the only one of five pipeline rows with a pending catalyst (C.2), the company calls it “our lead asset” in its own description [VERIFIED — 10-Q, 2026-08-14], and the entire re-rating of the shares from a split-adjusted 52-week low of $4.98 to $26.10 dates from its in-licensing.

C.2 Pipeline — every program

No row returned by fetch_company_drugs carries stage_label: "Failed", so no discontinued or failed row is listed above. The CUE-100 oncology series has not been marked failed; it was licensed to ImmunoScape in November 2025 in exchange for 40% of ImmunoScape’s equity, and Cue retains that stake [VERIFIED — 10-Q, ImmunoScape Collaboration and License Agreement, effective 2025-11-06].

Only bpiq_drug_id 20405 has has_catalyst: true. That single fact is what makes the attribution reading in the program document CLEAN: there is no second pending catalyst on this ticker to collide with.

C.3 Financial position

The going-concern note does not raise substantial doubt: the company states its cash plus the July proceeds “will be sufficient to meet its projected operating needs at least through the next twelve months” [VERIFIED — 10-Q]. The catalyst in C.2 lands inside that window with room to spare, which is the fact that matters for the program document’s financing risk.

Dilution history. Every raise in the last 24 months, plus the reverse split that reset the share count. Prices before 2026-04-23 are pre-split; the split-adjusted equivalent is given because otherwise the two halves of this table cannot be compared.

Is a raise likely before the next catalyst? No. The company took in $49.8 million net six weeks ago, holds roughly $67 million, states a runway of at least twelve months, and the catalyst is six weeks away. The $36.8 million of unused at-the-market capacity ($80 million authorised less $43.2 million drawn) is the standing mechanism that could be used after the event, in either direction, and it is one of the anchors the program document’s miss scenario rests on [VERIFIED — 10-Q].

C.4 Valuation frame

Why the economic share count matters more than usual here. Cue has raised almost all of its recent money in pre-funded warrants rather than shares. A pre-funded warrant is a right to buy a share for a token amount — $0.001 here — that the buyer has already paid for in full; it is a share in everything but name, and the company itself counts 3,742,562 of them inside its basic earnings-per-share denominator for exactly that reason [VERIFIED — 10-Q, earnings-per-share note]. The 7,264,414 reported at 2026-08-12 therefore understates the real ownership base. Adding the pre-funded warrants still outstanding gives roughly 10.6 to 10.9 million economic shares [UNVERIFIED — derived: 7,264,414 reported, plus the 3,742,562 pre-funded warrants outstanding at 2026-06-30 and the 87,500 issued in July, less an unquantified number exercised between 2026-06-30 and 2026-08-12; the exact split cannot be read from the filings available this sweep]. Beyond those, 2,592,014 ordinary warrants and 1,563,795 options were outstanding at 2026-06-30 [VERIFIED — 10-Q]. Cash per economic share is therefore roughly $6.28 ($67.2 million ÷ ~10.7 million), not the $9.25 the reported count would suggest.

There is no committed price cache for CUE, so the run-up baseline this row normally supplies is weaker than usual for this ticker, and no run-up settlement can be resolved against committed price history until scripts/fetch-prices.mjs covers it. That is recorded as a data gap rather than worked around.

C.5 Ownership and flow

BPIQ reports short_float of 0.09563. That is roughly twice the FINRA figure however the FINRA figure is read — 4.82% of shares outstanding or 6.0% of float — so the two sources do not agree under any reading, and the FINRA-derived number is used everywhere below because its units are known [VERIFIED — FINRA; BPIQ fetch_company_info].

Distinguishing conviction buying from routine grants. Two purchases in this record are real cash at risk, and both are far below today’s price:

• Dr Shao-Lee Lin, chief executive, bought into the May 2026 private placement on her own account — 90,906 pre-funded warrants at $11.00 plus 45,453 accompanying warrants, roughly $1.0 million [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_insider_transactions, transaction date 2026-06-01; 10-Q, which names her as a May 2026 Investor]. That is a chief executive putting personal money in at $11.00 against a $26.10 price today.
• Dr Pasha Sarraf, a director, bought 323,857 shares in the open market on 2025-12-30 at $0.3003 to $0.3174 — roughly $0.10 million, and, split-adjusted, $9.01 to $9.52 per share [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_insider_transactions].

Everything else in the record is a grant or a tax sale. The 2026-07-09 restricted-stock-unit awards — 327,537 shares to the chief executive, 54,589 to the chief legal officer, 40,942 to the principal accounting officer and 21,800 to each of four directors — are compensation, not purchases [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_insider_transactions]. The sales that followed in mid-August are the tax consequence of those awards vesting: the press feed describes the chief legal officer’s $265,627 sale and the accounting officer’s $169,323 sale as an “exec’s tax sell-to-cover after equity grant” [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_press_releases, 2026-08-17].

One item is worth flagging without over-reading it. The chief executive sold 18,258 shares on 2026-08-14, and an SEC Rule 144 notice was filed the same day for a planned sale of 58,258 shares [VERIFIED — EDGAR submissions: Form 4 accession 0001725092-26-000013 and Form 144 accession 0001725092-26-000011, both filed 2026-08-14; BPIQ fetch_company_press_releases 2026-08-15]. An SEC Rule 144 notice is a required disclosure of intent to sell restricted stock, not a completed sale. Set against her $11.00 purchase ten weeks earlier, this reads as partial monetisation of vested compensation rather than a change of view, but it is a sale by the chief executive six weeks before a binary readout and it is recorded here rather than smoothed over.

Fund positioning is thin. BPIQ’s hedge-fund block, labelled 2026Q3, holds two names: ADAR1 Capital Management with 55,193 shares and Ikarian Capital with 104,364 shares [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_hedge_fund_holdings 2026-08-19]. Between them that is about 2.2% of shares outstanding. The block’s own value-to-share ratios ($31.54 and $31.55) agree with each other but match no quarter-end price, so the dollar values are not used; the share counts are. See C.8.

The connector and the filing feed disagree at the edge. BPIQ’s insider record stops at 2026-07-30, while EDGAR shows Form 4 filings on 2026-08-14 and 2026-08-17 that the connector does not carry. That is a window difference rather than the empty-result failure 02-connectors.md records on other tickers; the August flow above is read from the filing feed and the press feed.

C.6 Options chain and its readability

The chain cannot price this event, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of thin volume. Every listed strike is at or below $5.00 while the share price is $26.10, so there is no strike anywhere near the money and an at-the-money straddle cannot be constructed at all. Three of the four expirations BPIQ returns — 2026-05-15, 2026-06-18 and 2026-07-17 — are already in the past as of 2026-08-19. The strikes were almost certainly never adjusted for the 1-for-30 reverse split of 2026-04-23. No figure below should be read as an options-market view of anything.

The program document therefore brackets the expected move from the class averages in framework/07-benchmarks.md rather than from this chain, as 03b-program-spec.md requires when the chain is unusable.

C.7 Reaction to past catalysts

What is missing from this table matters more than what is in it. BPIQ’s historical-catalyst feed does not carry the two largest moves in this stock’s recent history, because neither was a clinical catalyst: 2026-04-30, when the CUE-221 licence, the new chief executive and a $30 million placement were announced together, and 2026-06-05, which the press feed records as “CUE Stock On Track For Best Day In History” [VERIFIED — BPIQ fetch_company_press_releases]. The share price then ran to a 52-week high of $45.50 and has since fallen to $26.10 — a 43% drawdown, with the July placement priced at $33.21 along the way. Any read of “how does CUE react to news” that uses only the table above will understate both the upside and the drawdown this stock is capable of.

C.8 Company data-quality flags

• market_cap is computed off the previous close. $186,695,440 ÷ 7,264,414 EDGAR-filed shares is exactly $25.70, the reported previous_close, against a $26.10 last price. The known bug fires on this ticker. C.4 recomputes from the filed share count.
• max_52_week_position is computed off the previous close too. BPIQ’s 0.51135 equals (25.70 − 4.98) ÷ (45.50 − 4.98) to five decimals, while the last-price computation gives 0.5212. Both failure modes named in 02-connectors.md fire on the same ticker here.
• enterprise_value does not reconcile. $172,089,863 against a market_cap of $186,695,440 and a cash field of $16,379,000 implies subtracting $14,605,577, which is neither the cash figure on the same row nor the $17.392 million on the current balance sheet. C.4 recomputes.
• cash, ttm_burn, qtr_burn and monthly_burn are all stamped 2026-03-31. The $16,379,000 cash figure matches the “$16.4 million” the company reported for 2026-03-31, so the field is correct but three and a half months stale — and it predates the licence payment, both financings and the entire change of management. Using it would misstate this company badly.
• short_float disagrees with FINRA by roughly a factor of two in a way no unit conversion explains. See C.5.
• The options chain was not adjusted for the reverse split, and three of its four expirations have already passed. See C.6.
• The hedge-fund block’s dollar values match no quarter-end. Both funds imply $31.54–$31.55 per share, a price CUE traded near in late July 2026, not at either the 2026-06-30 or the 2026-09-30 quarter-end. Following the CNTB precedent in 02-connectors.md, the share counts are used and the values are discarded.
• There is no data/prices/CUE.json. The price cache does not cover this ticker, so the 52-week position in C.4 is computed by hand from BPIQ’s high and low rather than derived in lib/prices.mjs, the priced-in run-up driver falls back to its neutral default, and no run-up settlement can be resolved against committed price history until the cache covers CUE.
• The share price series spans a 1-for-30 reverse split on 2026-04-23. Every pre-split figure in this document is labelled as such. Third-party price targets found on the open web mix the two conventions freely and are unusable for that reason; see the program document’s Market and timing section.