BioPharma

Protein motion-focused Relay Therapeutics files for $200M IPO

The company, which combines computational technology with biology and chemistry to uncover new drug targets, has a drug in clinical development and plans to start clinical studies of another one later this year.

A company that less than two years ago raised $400 million in a venture capital funding round has filed to go public.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Relay Therapeutics said it would seek to raise $200 million in its IPO, whereby it would trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol RLAY. J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Cowen and Guggenheim Securities are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering.

While targeted drugs often work by preventing the binding of a ligand to its active site, Relay’s allosteric drug-discovery approach involves the combination of structural biology, biophysics, computational technology and research from other fields to enable detection and characterization of interactions that occur anywhere on a protein rather than only at the active site. The idea is to find new, druggable targets by observing how the proteins within cells fold and unfold.

The company completed a $400 million Series C funding round in December 2018. Since then, it has already begun moving its product candidates into clinical development.

In January, it started a Phase I study of RLY-1971, a SHP2 inhibitor, designed to enroll 52 participants with advanced or metastatic solid tumor cancers, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. According to its SEC filing, the company has completed the preclinical studies necessary to file for Food and Drug Administration authorization to begin Phase I testing of its second drug, the FGFR2 inhibitor RLY-4008, which it expects to initiate in the second half of this year. A third program, RLY-PI3K1047, involves a PI3K inhibitor for which it plans to start preclinical studies to enable clinical development starting in 2021.

In the filing, the company also highlighted its drug-discovery platform, Dynamo, which focuses on the field of protein motion and combines technology like room-temperature crystallography and the use of the Anton 2 supercomputer, built by D.E. Shaw Research. While focused on precision medicine in oncology, the company also foresees Dynamo as having applicability in genetic disease.

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