A red-hot ven­ture mar­ket back in 2018 pro­pelled Re­lay Ther­a­peu­tics to a whop­ping $400 mil­lion crossover round. And now, the biotech is rid­ing on a red-hot IPO mar­ket to a pub­lic de­but that brought in the same ex­act amount.

The $400 mil­lion raise breaks down to 20 mil­lion shares sold at $20 each — above even the amend­ed pro­posed range of $16 to $18.

It’s al­so dou­ble what Re­lay had pen­ciled in with the ini­tial S-1 fil­ing, in yet an­oth­er il­lus­tra­tion that those fig­ures are of­ten noth­ing more than a place­hold­er these days.

On a mis­sion to piv­ot from the in­dus­try stan­dard struc­ture-based drug de­sign to “mo­tion-based drug de­sign,” Re­lay’s Dy­namo plat­form promis­es to find bet­ter ways to drug a tar­get pro­tein by sim­u­lat­ing its dy­nam­ic over time.

Dorothee Kern

“The whole beau­ty of en­zymes is that they ac­tu­al­ly move,” Dorothee Kern, a Bran­deis pro­fes­sor and one of four sci­en­tist co-founders, pre­vi­ous­ly told End­points News. “And if they don’t move they are dead. There’s a rea­son life doesn’t ex­ist be­low 180 kelvin.”

To­geth­er with bil­lion­aire David Shaw, Matthew Ja­cob­son of UCSF and Mark Mur­cko of MIT (and with the help of Third Rock) Kern found a way to in­cor­po­rate troves of ge­nom­ic da­ta, new ex­per­i­men­tal tech­niques and ma­chine learn­ing in­to the com­pa­ny — buzzy con­cepts that lured Soft­Bank, GV and Fore­site, among oth­ers, in­to the syn­di­cate.

As the team, led by CEO San­jiv Pa­tel, has played its cards close to the vest burn­ing through $214 mil­lion, the IPO doc­u­ments of­fered the first glimpse at the lead pro­grams, now in Phase I.

They rec­og­nize they are not the on­ly ones eye­ing these tar­gets. RLY-1971 will be com­pet­ing with Rev­o­lu­tion Med­i­cines (part­nered with Sanofi) and Ja­co­bio Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (part­nered with Ab­b­Vie) in the SHP2 space. And RLY-4008 has even more ri­vals al­so pur­su­ing FGFR2, in­clud­ing In­cyte, Janssen, Ei­sai and Ot­su­ka sub­sidiary Tai­ho, as well as Chi­nese play­er In­no­Core.

Then there’s the mu­tant-se­lec­tive PI3Kα in­hibitor pro­gram, for which Re­lay plans to se­lect a can­di­date with the pro­ceeds. It’s go­ing up against Piqray, mar­ket­ed by gi­ant No­var­tis, in ad­di­tion to ex­per­i­men­tal ef­forts at Roche and oth­ers.

So Re­lay has plen­ty to prove.

Soft­Bank Vi­sion Fund re­tains the largest chunk of stock — 32.12% — af­ter the of­fer­ing, while Third Rock kept 15.38%.

Three Senate Democrats are backing an FDA plan to require mandatory prescriber education for opioids as overdose deaths have risen sharply over the past decade, with almost 97,000 American opioid-related overdose deaths in the past year alone.

While acknowledging a decline in overall opioid analgesic dispensing in recent years, the FDA said it’s reconsidering the need for mandatory prescriber training through a REMS given the current situation with overdoses, and is seeking input on the aspects of the opioid crisis that mandatory training could potentially mitigate.

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It took seven months from exiting “quiet mode” for Ventyx Biosciences to land its very own stock ticker, raising $165 million in venture funds along the way.

Now, after pricing a massive $151.5 million IPO, the Encinitas, CA-based biotech is gunning for Phase II.

Ventyx priced close to 9.5 million shares at $16 apiece on Wednesday, the midpoint of its $15 to $17 range. CEO Raju Mohan filed the S-1 papers at the end of September, just over a week after unveiling a $114 million Series B round. He penciled in the standard figure of $100 million at first, likely knowing that in the last year, it’s been common for biotechs to raise much more than those initial estimates.

Just as Avoro Capital’s campaign to derail Merck’s proposed $11.5 billion buyout of Acceleron gains steam, Bristol Myers Squibb is leaning in with some hefty counterweight.

The pharma giant is planning to tender its Acceleron shares, Bloomberg reported, which add up to a sizable 11.5% stake. Based on the offer price, the sale would net Bristol Myers around $1.3 billion.

To complete its deal, Merck needs a majority of shareholders to agree to sell their shares.

When John Maher treated the first head and neck cancer patient at Guy’s Hospital in London with his pan-ErbB CAR-T back in 2015, he was among a small club of researchers convinced they had an answer to the challenges that had kept those engineered T cells — wildly successful in hematological cancers — either too dangerous or out of reach for patients with solid tumors.

The field has blossomed since then, with a proliferation of technologies that promise to address any number of challenges identified as unique to solid tumors. And Maher himself has rethought his approach and come up with a new CAR-T platform to generate the next slate of candidates.