Three weeks after Roche’s Genentech unit walked away from an SHP2 inhibitor pact, Relay Therapeutics has confirmed that it won’t be pushing ahead with the asset solo.
Genentech initially paid $75 million upfront in 2021 to license Relay’s SHP2 inhibitor, a molecule referred to at various times as RLY-1971, migoprotafib or GDC-1971. At the time, Genentech’s thinking was that migoprotafib could be paired with its KRAS G12C inhibitor GDC-6036.
In the following years, Relay secured $45 million in milestone payments under the pact, but hopes of bringing in a further $675 million in biobucks down the line were abruptly ended last month when Genentech decided to terminate the collaboration.
Announcing that decision at the time, Relay didn’t hint at what plans, if any, it had to take forward migoprotafib without its Big Pharma partner. But in its second-quarter earnings report yesterday, the biotech confirmed that it “will not continue development of migoprotafib.”
The lack of commitment to SHP is hardly surprising, with Big Pharmas losing interest in the modality in recent years. Sanofi axed its Revolution Medicines pact in 2022, while AbbVie scrapped a deal with Jacobio in 2023, and Bristol Myers Squibb called time on an agreement with BridgeBio Pharma earlier this year.
Relay also has some shiny new toys to play with, having kicked off the summer by unveiling three new R&D programs it had selected from its preclinical pipeline. They include RLY-2608, a mutant selective PI3Kα inhibitor for vascular malformations that the biotech hopes to take into the clinic in the first months of next year.
There’s also a non-inhibitory chaperone for Fabry disease—designed to stabilize the αGal protein without inhibiting its activity—set to enter phase 1 later in the second half of 2025 along with a RAS-selective inhibitor for solid tumors.
“We look forward to expanding the RLY-2608 development program, with the initiation of a new triplet combination with Pfizer’s novel investigative selective-CDK4 inhibitor atirmociclib by the end of the year,” Relay CEO Sanjiv Patel, M.D., said in yesterday’s release.
“Looking further ahead, we are very excited by the pre-clinical programs we unveiled in June, including our first two genetic disease programs, which will be important in driving our continued growth and diversification,” the CEO added.