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%.

Janet Woodcock may have one of the most historically long and drug-intense tenures in FDA history, but her new role is outside of all things pharma and the once-acting FDA commissioner isn’t looking back.

“No I really don’t look back,” Woodcock told Endpoints News via email on Monday morning. “Yes I will be transitioning. Longer discussion on infrastructure needed.”

Pfizer has agreed to pay $290,000 to settle allegations of questionable copay coupon practices in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Vermont from 2014 to 2018.

While the company has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, Pfizer has agreed to issue restitution checks to about 5,000 consumers.

A Pfizer spokesperson said the company has “enhanced its co-pay coupons to alleviate the concerns raised by states and agreed to a $30,000 payment to each.”

A judge in Delaware has ruled against Astellas Pharma and Gilead in a long-running patent case over Pfizer-onwed Hospira’s generic version of Lexiscan.

The case kicked off in 2018, after Hospira submitted an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for approval to market a generic version of Gilead’s Lexiscan. The drug is used in myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), a type of nuclear stress test.

The area of Ireland famous for Blarney Castle and its cliffsides along the Atlantic Ocean is seeing Merck KGaA expand its commitment there.

The German drug manufacturer is expanding its membrane and filtration manufacturing capabilities in Ireland. The company will invest approximately €440 million ($470 million) to increase membrane manufacturing capacity in Carrigtwohill, Ireland, and build a new manufacturing facility at Blarney Business Park, in County Cork, Ireland.

Twenty House Democrats, including Reps. Katie Porter of California and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, are calling on Senate leaders to move quickly with a reconciliation bill (meaning they only need a simple majority for passage) with prescription drug pricing reforms, and to include adding new authority for Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

They also called on the Senate to specifically follow suit with the House passage of a $35 per month insulin cap (as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s deadline for a vote on that provision has come and gone), and to cap Medicare Part D costs at $2,000 per year for seniors.

As the cases of monkeypox now sit at well over 100 worldwide and have spread to multiple continents, the orders for any type of vaccine against monkeypox are seeing nations and medical bodies looking to get their hands on anything and everything. And now SIGA Technologies seems to be getting in on the action.

According to Euronews, SIGA Technologies, a pharmaceutical company that is focused on providing medical countermeasures to biological and chemical attacks, is now in talks with several European authorities looking to stockpile its antiviral that can counter monkeypox. The drug known as tecovirimat or Tpoxx was approved by the FDA in 2018 as a vaccine for smallpox but was approved by the European Medicines Agency to also act against monkeypox, cowpox and complications from immunization with vaccinia.