NEW YORK – Piper Sandler said on Monday that it has initiated coverage of Twist Bioscience and Codexis, both with an Overweight rating.
The investment bank gave shares of South San Francisco, California-based Twist a price target of $150. The company went public in 2018 and since then has offered additional shares in public offerings.
"We believe that Twist's high growth is sustainable with a growing customer base, revenue acceleration in NGS, [synthetic biology], biopharma, and longer-term in DNA data storage which can drive continued long-term growth," Piper Sandler Analyst Steven Mah wrote in a note to investors.
Mah noted that the synthetic biology space is "exciting" and could grow to a total addressable market of $270 billion to $1.15 trillion in the US. "An important distinction between Twist and many other SynBio companies is that it operates in both the product space and also in the drug discovery space to identify its own drug candidates and to also partner its drug candidates and drug discovery platform," he added.
In morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Twist were down nearly 3 percent at $128.62. The company's share price has risen nearly fivefold since the beginning of 2020.
Separately, Piper Sandler gave shares of enzyme engineering firm Codexis a price target of $32. In morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Codexis were flat at $24.03.