Anthropic's drug discovery partners: AI pharmaceutical orders will double next year

According to Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience, the company plans to double its revenue by 2031.

Recently, the 2026 Global Healthcare Conference hosted by U.S. investment bank Baird was officially held. At the conference, Twist Bioscience, the leading US-listed drug testing enterprise, updated its performance guidance for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2026.

According to remarks from CEO Emily Leproust, the company will achieve revenue of approximately 124 million US dollars in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2026, representing a 25% year-on-year increase, marking 15 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. The company's long-term plan is to double its revenue by 2031, which means the compound annual growth rate will reach around 15%.

Leproust emphasized that Drug discovery and data services driven by AI pharmaceutical R&D are the main driving forces for performance growth. She stated that the company's relevant order volume in 2025 was 25 million US dollars, will reach 50 million US dollars in 2026, and is expected to receive orders of up to 100 million US dollars in 2027, doubling compared with this year.

As a synthetic biology and genomics company, the core business of Twist Bioscience includes high-throughput DNA synthesis, protein expression and antibody discovery services. Essentially, it provides underlying wet lab verification services for AI pharmaceutical R&D enterprises and pharmaceutical companies, acting as the "shovel seller" at the upstream of the CXO industry chain. (Note from K: Wet lab verification refers to the procedure of verifying the results of "dry lab" outputs such as computer-simulated data by directly operating biological samples, chemical reagents or liquids.)

This round of order revenue growth may stem from the explosion of customer demand. Leproust believes that if the company can obtain a 100,000 US dollar pilot project, it will be converted into millions of dollars in orders in a few months. "Customers carry out pilots first, then obtain drug targets and sequences through large AI models, and finally contact the company for routine drug discovery." She said that this has formed a fixed process, The company's current top concern is that supply cannot keep up with the surging demand for AI drug discovery and data services.

Prior to this, the company had announced the launch of a 250 million US dollar additional share issuance plan, aiming to greatly expand its DNA synthesis production capacity.

It is worth noting that Twist Bioscience was designated as an independent experimental service provider by AI company Anthropic in August this year, to conduct wet experiments on minibinders (micro-binding proteins, covering a total of 15 targets and 1320 candidate protein sequences) designed by the latter with Claude Opus 4.8 and Mythos Preview models, and return the measured data to Anthropic for model iteration.

Catalyzed by the news of the cooperation with Anthropic, Twist Bioscience has accumulated an increase of more than 50% since August this year. Since the beginning of this year, the stock has accumulated an increase of more than 335%.

From the perspective of industrial logic, it has become the current industry consensus that the explosion of AI pharmaceutical R&D demand drives the growth of upstream orders in the life science sector.

Industrial Securities stated that the core of the sharp rise of CXO is the resonance of performance improvement and valuation repair brought by changes on the demand side, forming a Davis double click. AI for Science is an additional bonus on top of this round of market rally. It brings incremental demand to the industry. Large technology enterprises, as new participants entering this track, correspond to the downstream demand side, which further amplifies the demand for upstream services.

Soochow Securities pointed out that global technology giants are deeply embedded in biomedicine through different paths, and AI pharmaceutical R&D has entered the strategic layout stage. The closed loop of dry and wet experiments is the core operation logic chain of AIDD, and wet experiments are irreplaceable. On the upstream demand side, links such as gene synthesis, protein expression and purification, in vitro verification, and model animals will all benefit systematically from the explosion of AI candidate molecules.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily", Author: Zhang Zhen, published with authorization from 36Kr.