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%.

What’s Biohaven without its CGRP portfolio? That’s what CEO Vlad Coric is tasked with deciding as he maps out the new Biohaven post-Pfizer takeover.

Pfizer officially scooped up Biohaven’s CGRP assets on Monday, including blockbuster migraine drug Nurtec and the investigational zavegepant, for $11.6 billion. As a result, Coric spun the broader pipeline into an independent company on Tuesday — with the same R&D team behind Nurtec but about 1,000 fewer staffers and a renewed focus on neuroscience and rare disease.

There are some odd-looking purple creatures lurking around the halls of AstraZenca lately. The “Phil” character cutouts are purple, personified eosinophils with big buggy eyes and wide mouths, and they’re a part of AZ’s newest awareness effort to help people understand eosinophilic asthma.

The “Asthma Behaving Badly” characters aren’t only on the walls at AZ to show the new campaign to employees, however. The “Phils” are also showing up online on the campaign website, and in digital and social ads and posts on Facebook and Instagram.

As Leo Pharma aims to take on heavyweight champ Dupixent in atopic dermatitis, the company is launching “AD Days Around the World,” an awareness campaign documenting real patient stories across Europe.

The project, unveiled on Monday, spotlights four patients: Marjolaine, Laura, Julia and África from France, Italy, Germany and Spain, respectively, in short video clips on the challenges of living with AD, the most common form of eczema.

In response to a question on manufacturing scale at Legend Biotech’s R&D day yesterday, the company’s top exec said its partnership with Johnson & Johnson will be doubling its investment in its New Jersey manufacturing center and will be investing a total of $500 million.

With an eye on their BCMA-directed CAR-T therapy Carvykti (cilta-cel), approved in February as a fifth-line treatment for multiple myeloma, Legend CEO Ying Huang said that the ramp-up in production and the decision to manufacture its own lentiviral vectors — currently in shortage worldwide — means they won’t have to deal with that shortage.

Kite Pharma just got FDA approval to kick off operations at a new manufacturing campus.

The cancer-focused, CAR-T cell therapy player made the announcement Monday, saying that the federal regulatory agency gave the green light to Kite’s 100,000 square-foot, retroviral vector manufacturing facility in Oceanside, CA.

Kite’s global head of technical operations Chris McDonald tells Endpoints News that the facility has been in the works for about four years, after Kite teamed up with its parent company Gilead. Gilead acquired Kite Pharma for just shy of $12 billion in 2017.