Oxford Nanopore Technologies PLC (LSE:ONT), the LSE-listed DNA sequencing company, has drawn positive reviews from RBC Capital Markets and Citi following its annual London Calling customer conference last week, with both brokers reiterating buy-equivalent ratings on the stock.
RBC Capital Markets carries an outperform rating and 225p target price, while Citi rates the shares buy with a high-risk designation, noting that Oxford Nanopore trades on just 2.3 times estimated 2027 enterprise value to sales, which it considers compelling given the company's growth profile.
The conference showcased a streamlined product portfolio and a series of near-term launches, including a new higher-throughput PromethION Plus flow cell, RNA transcriptomics chemistry and vaccine quality control workflows for the biopharmaceutical industry.
The new PromethION Plus flow cell introduces a redesigned buffer beneath the nanopore that delivers around 20% more data per flow cell without user intervention, improving cost-per-gigabase competitiveness.
Alongside a new barcoding system, this implies a cost of roughly $400 per genome, which remains above short-read sequencing costs but includes a significantly richer dataset covering structural variation and methylation.
Oxford Nanopore is also developing quality control workflows for mRNA vaccines and adventitious virus agent testing, with a compliance-ready GridION Q-line due to launch in June. Partners already working with the technology include Lonza, Moderna, BioNTech, Pfizer and Regeneron.
Citi said it came away more confident in Oxford Nanopore's value proposition and traction in both biopharma and clinical segments.
On the longer-term roadmap, the company demonstrated its first amino acid caller for protein sequencing, successfully identifying all 22 randomly selected E. coli proteins tested against a database of 4,000, marking a step change from previous classifier-based approaches.
The appointment of a new chief medical officer, chief information officer and chief people officer signals the new chief executive is strengthening operational capability and doubling down on clinical applications.
RBC expects the new chief executive to provide more detail on strategy at the first-half results presentation, which it sees as an important event for the stock.
Oxford Nanopore shares were flat at 128.98p.