Twist Bioscience shares surge on Eli Lilly AI partnership

Twist Bioscience Corporation (TWST) shares rose 16.11% to close at $184.03 on September 24, hitting a 52-week high. The surge follows the announcement of a collaboration with Eli Lilly to support TuneLab, an AI and machine learning-driven drug discovery platform. Through this partnership, Twist Bioscience will provide antibody characterization services and preferred protocols, using the resulting experimental data to train its own antibody development prediction model, AbLab.

In conjunction with the partnership, Leerink analyst Puneet Souda raised the company’s price target from $120 to $160, citing long-term revenue potential and growth in AI-driven drug discovery. The company has set a long-term revenue goal of $1 billion for fiscal year 2031.

Separately, CEO Emily Leproust sold 5,203 shares for approximately $922,908 at an average price of $177.38. The sale was conducted under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, reducing her direct stake by 0.84% to 613,699 shares. Despite the stock's recent rally, recent quarterly reports showed a net loss of $35.05 million and revenue of $118.38 million.