BioPharma

Relay Therapeutics prices IPO at $400M

The company, whose drug-discovery efforts are focused on protein motion and detection of interactions that occur anywhere on a protein rather than only at active sites, filed to go public last month.

A company focused on discovering drugs through research into protein motion has announced the pricing of its initial public offering.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Relay Therapeutics said Wednesday that it had priced its IPO at $400 million, offering 20 million shares of its common stock at $20 apiece. The shares were expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Thursday under the ticker symbol RLAY, and the offering is expected to close Monday. An additional 3 million shares are being offered for purchase to the IPO’s underwriters.

Relay initially filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 25, stating that it was looking to raise $200 million. It had completed a Series C venture capital funding round worth $400 million in December 2018. Since that round, it has already started to move its product candidates into clinical development.

Whereas most targeted drugs work by preventing the binding of a ligand to its active site, Relay’s allosteric approach to drug discovery involves detection and characterization of interactions that occur anywhere on a protein rather than only at the active site. The company uses a combination of research from multiple fields in its efforts, including structural biology, computational technology, biophysics and others, with the goal of finding new and druggable targets by observing how the proteins within cells fold and unfold.

In its S-1 filing last month, the company 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.

It has since started moving some of its programs into the clinic.

In January, Relay initiated a Phase I study of RLY-1971, a SHP2 inhibitor. The study is designed to enroll 52 participants with advanced or metastatic solid tumor cancers, according to its ClinicalTrials.gov page. In addition, according to the SEC filing, the company has finished preclinical studies in preparation for filing with the Food and Drug Administration to start Phase I testing of a second drug, the FGFR2 inhibitor RLY-4008, in the second half of the year. And next year, it plans to start preclinical studies toward clinical development of RLY-PI3K1047, a PI3K inhibitor.

Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images

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