Jefferies has reiterated its 'buy' rating on Oxford BioMedica with a £8.27 price target, 57% above Thursday's closing price of £5.27.
Oxford BioMedica (OXB), a contract developer and manufacturer of cell and gene therapies, is valued at £637 million, with its shares having traded as high as £9.62 in the past year.
The note follows a fireside chat hosted by Jefferies, OXB's corporate broker, with chief financial officer Lucy Crabtree and chief innovation officer Kyriacos Mitrophanous.
Guidance and orders
Management said three factors drove this year's guidance revision: programme deferrals, changes in client ordering and a delay of about six months at its Durham site in the US, with none materially larger than the others.
About £168 million of 2026 revenue is covered by committed orders, and changes within binding forecast periods trigger change orders or cancellation fees, with revenue generally shifting rather than being lost.
Existing clients account for about 30% of opportunities and proposal conversion is 85%.
OXB has signed 17 new clients in the first half and four since, taking it to 59 programmes across 50 clients, and its pipeline has risen about 30% to $713 million before risk adjustment.
Automation and new therapies
Automated experiment design lets OXB test six to seven process parameters for the time and cost it once needed for three to five, cutting development time for a typical experiment by about 80%.
Management argued that moving chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy inside the body would remove a costly laboratory step and make vector manufacture, the production of the modified viruses that deliver genetic material, more important.
Its adeno-associated virus pipeline now exceeds its lentiviral vector opportunities, and the US share of its pipeline has risen since it bought Durham.
Jefferies cited customer concentration, ramp-up risk and competition among the risks to its target.
The note gives Mitrophanous's title only as "CIO"; I've used chief innovation officer, so please check it against OXB's website.
