Drug Discovery Start-Up Gains $400M Financing
Relay Therapeutics, 2-year-old company using computational techniques to find protein-targeting drugs, raised $400 million in new financing, led by the venture funding arm of Softbank. The new funds are the third venture round for the Cambridge, Mass., company co-founded by Hertz Fellow Matthew Jacobson. Relay discovers new therapies for diseases considered difficult to treat. The company’s technology is built on research into protein movement and dynamics, a different investigation of proteins from conventional work that the company says views proteins largely as static entities. Relay says its drug discovery work interacts with the dynamics of proteins, which combines the structure of protein molecules, with chemistry, biophysics, and computational techniques.