NEW YORK – TD Cowen on Friday upgraded shares of Pacific Biosciences to an Outperform rating with a price target of $15.
The move comes following a TD Cowen survey of high-throughput next-generation sequencing customers that revealed a large appetite for PacBio products.
"Our diligence supports the notion that long-read sequencing technology will become a more significant form factor in genomics and the sequencing market going forward, with PacBio a key beneficiary," Analyst Dan Brennan wrote in a note to investors. "With our survey signaling robust demand expectations for the Revio and long reads, along with an improving story in years to come (more product lines, improving margins, and profitability), we believe now is the time to take a more bullish stance on PacBio stock."
"Surveyed users expect to buy almost three Revios per lab on average through to 2024," Brennan wrote. And at a recent TD Cowen investor event, the Broad Institute said it expects long-read sequencing to grow from less than 1 percent of sequencing spending to about 25 percent in the future.
In Friday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of PacBio rose 10 percent to $10.72.