Ver­sant-backed, Bris­tol My­ers-stamped Re­pare Ther­a­peu­tics guns for $100M IPO

With a Bris­tol My­ers Squibb en­dorse­ment in tow, Ver­sant-backed can­cer drug de­vel­op­er Re­pare Ther­a­peu­tics has set its sights on a Nas­daq de­but.

On Fri­day, the Mon­tre­al-based com­pa­ny with op­er­a­tions in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts that is yet to en­ter the clin­ic, un­veiled plans for a $100 mil­lion IPO, bank­ing on its “syn­thet­ic lethal­i­ty” plat­form.

The ba­sic idea is to tar­get the ge­net­ic ba­sis of tu­mors, a com­mon idea across pre­ci­sion on­col­o­gy med­i­cines. But in­stead of tar­get­ing the per­pe­tra­tor mu­ta­tion di­rect­ly, the com­pound is de­signed to go af­ter the oth­er gene in the gene pair. The ra­tio­nale is based on the decades-old ge­net­ic prin­ci­ple that in­di­cates two mu­ta­tions are lethal on­ly when com­bined to­geth­er.

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