Precision medicine biotech Relay Therapeutics is shedding about 10% of its workforce in efforts to streamline the organization.
About 30 people will be impacted by the workforce reduction, a Relay spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in an emailed statement Oct. 3. The cuts follow a prior round of layoffs in July that included less than 5% of employees at the biotech, which staffed around 300 people at the time.
“Over the course of 2024, we have been streamlining our research organization through a series of changes,” the company spokesperson said. The process is designed to improve efficiency and expected to collectively save the biotech about $50 million a year, according to the spokesperson.
The 10% layoffs, first reported by Endpoints News, are “the last of these changes,” the spokesperson told Fierce.
The company’s three clinical-stage programs remain unaffected, and five unnamed programs are being advanced, according to the spokesperson.
The biotech is still pausing work on RLY-2139, a preclinical oral small molecule designed to inhibit CDK2 that the company nominated as a development candidate in the first quarter of 2023 and then paused development on later in the year.
The company has also deprioritized RLY-5836, a preclinical pan-mutant selective PI3Kα inhibitor.
“Those program decisions had nothing to do with the research personnel changes we have made throughout the year,” the Relay spokesperson told Fierce. “Those were more tied to fiscal discipline and how to prioritize the allocation of our capital in a time when the capital markets have been challenging.”
Other pipeline changes include the discontinuation of GDC-1971, a SHP2 inhibitor also known as RLY-1971 or migoprotafib. Relay announced the end of work on the asset in August, a few weeks after Roche’s Genentech scrapped a deal related to the asset, returning rights to Relay after putting more than $120 million into the alliance. The action was part of a broader movement in which several Big Pharmas moved away from SHP2 inhibitors.
Relay is now turning its focus to RLY-2608, a mutant selective PI3Kα inhibitor being studied alongside fulvestrant in an early-stage trial of pretreated patients with PI3Kα-mutated, HR+, HER2- locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer. The combo led to a “clinically meaningful progression free survival”—a median of 9.2 months across all mutations—according to an interim data readout shared Sept. 9.
While the Massachusetts-based biotech’s stock rose rapidly to $9.51 per share on the heels of the September data drop, it has gradually fallen since then, resting at $6.49 as of market close Oct. 3.
Relay also intends to study RLY-2608 in vascular malformations—rare abnormal developments in or of blood vessels. A clinical trial launch is slated for the first quarter of 2025.
The biotech also touts a non-inhibitory chaperone for Fabry disease that’s set to enter phase 1 testing in the second half of 2025, along with a RAS-selective inhibitor for solid tumors.