NEW YORK — SVB Leerink and BTIG on Monday initiated coverage of Olink. SVB Leerink gave the firm an Outperform rating and a $50 price target while BTIG started with a Buy rating and a $44 price target.
Both firms highlighted the Uppsala, Sweden-based company's proximity extension assay technology and its ability to enable highly multiplexed proteomic analyses.
PEA uses pairs of antibodies linked to DNA strands that are brought into proximity when the antibodies bind to their target. After DNA polymerase extension, the DNA product is detected by quantitative PCR or next-generation sequencing and can be used as a surrogate marker for the target protein.
Olink offers a library of assays to roughly 1,500 proteins, which it plans to expand to around 3,000 proteins this year. It has also begun using NGS to read out the results, offering an NGS-based version of the assay named the Explore 1536 on Illumina's NovaSeq platform.
In an investor note, SVB Leerink analysts Puneet Souda, Scott Mafale, and Westley Dupray highlighted the large amount of revenue Olink generates per experiment, noting that kits can run in the $30,000 to $55,000 price range, "driving top customers to spend over $2 [million], and multiple accounts with more than $1 [million] in recurring rev[enue]s [from] high margin consumables annually."
The company "is poised to democratize the somewhat gated proteomics market with its differentiated and its consumables-only, highly multiplexed PEA technology," he added.
The PEA technology "allows simultaneous measurement of ~1,500 circulating protein biomarkers in blood, including low abundance proteins, faster and more cost effectively than ever before," BTIG analysts Sung Ji Nam and Janet Zhang wrote in an investor note. "Just as advances in high-throughput, increasingly cost-efficient, comprehensive genomic analysis approaches have revolutionized the field of genomics over the last decade, we believe the field of proteomics is ripe for disruption to further enhance insights into personalized and preventive medicine, and Olink is well positioned to capitalize on the opportunity."
SVB Leerink and BTIG acted as joint bookrunning managers for Olink's $264 million initial public offering in March.
In morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Olink were down less than 1 percent to $37.20.