Just a few short months after getting off a $106 million funding round and beefing up its C-suite as it looks to tap its SNAP platform to fight resistance to cancer drugs, Tyra Biosciences has filed to raise $100 million in an IPO.
Tyra is taking aim at acquired resistance, a problem that makes targeted cancer treatments stop working. Over time, tumors with mutations such as EGFR rewire themselves to find a way around targeted therapies and continue to grow without relying on proteins made by the mutated gene.
The Carlsbad, California-based biotech is working to understand the specific molecular drivers that cause resistance so it can develop small-molecule drugs that work on both the mutated, or resistant, form of a protein and the original form against which targeted drugs were made.
Its SNAP technology speeds up traditional structure-based drug discovery. It uses X-ray crystallography to take “structural SNAPshots” of each potential drug as it makes them and to look at how they interact with their targets.
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The biotech added a $106 million series C in March, alongside a new chief medical officer in Hiroomi Tada, M.D., Ph.D., and chief development officer, Piyush Patel, Ph.D., while also promoting its vice president of medicinal chemistry, Robert Hudkins, Ph.D., to chief technology officer.
Now, it wants to use the might of Wall Street to go public, bring another $100 million (if not more) to the pot and make good on its promise of getting into the clinic by the middle of next year.
First of those planned to be in testing is TYRA-300, which the company said in its SEC-1 has the potential to help in the fight against a number of cancers, including certain bladder cancers as well as other fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) 3-driven targets, such as hyperphosphatemia.
TYRA-300 is a selective inhibitor of a mutation known as FGFR3 and has been designed “to be more selective for FGFR3 over FGFR1 to minimize off-target side effects, providing potential clinical advantages over less selective first generation compound,” the company said.
Also on the cards is work on stopping FGFR2, initially for the treatment of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, or ICC, a cancer of the biliary duct.
Tyra plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "TYRA."