Big deal: Relay Therapeutics shapes $57m series A

Cancer is one the biggest healthcare challenges and a leading cause of death in modern society, and there is no lack of startups and spinouts aiming to tackle the disease, with an increasing number emerging since Global University Venturing last took a detailed look at the sector two years ago.
Medicine has come a long way since 2014, even if the world is still far from easy cures – the UK’s Office for National Statistics last week released its first forecasts predicting that 80.6% of breast cancer patients and 79.9% of prostate cancer patients diagnosed in 2015 will survive until at least 2025.
Rebecca Smittenaar, statistics manager at charity Cancer Research UK, said: “Cancer survival is improving and has doubled over the last 40 years. For a number of cancers, including breast and skin cancer, more than eight out of 10 people will survive their disease.
“Research has led to better treatments, new drugs, more accurate tests, earlier diagnosis and screening programmes, giving patients a better chance of survival.”
The figures are not as comforting across the board, however. Of those diagnosed with brain cancer, only 11.9% can expect to survive the next decade, while patients diagnosed with lung cancer have a 9.8% chance of surviving. Patients with pancreatic cancer have only a 5.7% of survival rate.
In the US, the government’s National Cancer Institute noted that patients living beyond a cancer diagnosis reached approximately 14.5 million in 2014 and will rise to nearly 19 million by 2024.
By the end of 2016, more than 1.6 million new cases of cancer are expected to have been diagnosed in the US, and close to 600,000 will have died from the disease.
So there is a continuing need for more efficient treatments, despite some encouraging figures. A lot of hope is being placed on immunotherapies – a range of approaches that rely on using the body’s own immune system, such as reprogramming it to recognise and attack tumour cells – but that avenue has suffered setbacks, most prominently last month when pharmaceutical firm Bristol-Myers Squibb’s drug Opdivo failed as a first-line therapy for newly-diagnosed lung cancer patients.
Now Relay Therapeutics, a company that emerged last week, is using a novel technology to take on the disease.
Relay, which was actually founded six months ago but has remained in stealth mode, announced it had secured $57m in series A capital from biochemistry research company DE Shaw Research and VC firm Third Rock Ventures.
The company is commercialising research conducted by David Shaw, founder of the aforementioned business, Matthew Jacobson of University of California San Francisco, Dorothee Kern of Brandeis University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Mark Murcko of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That research revolves around protein motion and a breakthrough in understanding the dynamic structural changes by protein molecules in the human body. Relay’s drug discovery platform, essentially, aims to exploit the way proteins fold from one shape into another to develop treatments.
The platform, while focused initially on cancer, could theoretically be applied to a range of other conditions for which no efficient therapy currently exists.
Although protein motion has been investigated by researchers for decades, actually computing these changes was a time-intensive process until recently.
In 2010, DE Shaw used a specially designed supercomputer, dubbed Anton, to simulate three-dimensional changes over a period of one millisecond – a hundred times longer than the previous record. An impressive improvement, certainly, but it took Anton about 100 days to calculate that simulation.
Combining the increased processing power of 2016’s chips with other advances, such as a X-ray crystallography, which can reveal the structure of proteins, now makes it possible for Relay to develop new drugs.
Conventional drugs usually access sites often also present on other proteins, creating side-effects. Relay’s technology makes it possible to target spots on a protein identified through knowing how the protein changes shape and are not active, avoiding problems surrounding the traditional approach.
Relay, for now, has not said how long it expects to take before unveiling its first drug candidate, but with $57m in its coffers the company should be well equipped to make significant gains towards that goal.
The company’s recruitment drive to grow from 25 employees to 40 staff in the next year should also help in advancing beyond pre-clinical development.
Alexis Borisy, executive chairman and interim chief executive of Relay Therapeutics, and a partner at Third Rock Ventures, said: “Our integration of protein motion into the heart of the drug discovery process represents both a philosophical and technological once-in-a-generation paradigm shift.
“At Relay, we have assembled the team and tools to build the first company with a dedicated drug discovery pipeline centred around protein motion. This advancement in drug discovery – from static to dynamic – creates opportunities to develop more effective therapies that we believe will improve and extend the lives of millions of patients.”