Repare Therapeutics is laying off a quarter of its workforce as the oncology biotech scales back its preclinical work to focus on more advanced candidates such as a synthetic lethal drug handed back by Roche earlier this year.
The biotech had a number of synthetic lethal targets in advanced stages of preclinical development, according to the company’s website. But Repare has decided to “materially reduce the scale of its preclinical research and discovery activities,” the company said in a post-market release Aug. 28.
This “strategic refocus” will see the company reduce its overall workforce by around 25%, with the biotech’s preclinical group bearing the brunt of the layoffs. Repare had 179 full-time employees as of February, of which 143 were primarily engaged in some form of R&D and 36 were focused on management or general and administrative activities.
The redundancies outlined yesterday are expected to incur between $1.5 million and $2 million of costs in the third quarter before generating annual savings of $15 million.
Repare ended June with $208.1 million in cash and equivalents, which it had estimated would fund its operations until at least mid-2026. The savings outlined in the Aug. 28 release are expected to pave a cash runway further into that year.
“We acknowledge today the extraordinary contributions and productivity of our discovery team, who have enabled the development of our deep, innovative clinical portfolio,” Repare’s CEO Lloyd Segal said in the release.
“In our mission to rapidly develop new, practice-changing therapies, we will more fully dedicate our resources to our most promising and advanced precision oncology programs to maximize value for patients and for our shareholders,” Segal added.
Those programs include a phase 1 dose expansion trial of a combination of the biotech’s lunresertib and camonsertib in patients with ovarian and endometrial cancers due to read out in the fourth quarter of 2024. Segal has previously touted phase 1 data of the PKMYT1 inhibitor lunresertib as “really phenomenal,” while the ATR inhibitor camonsertib made headlines in February when Roche walked away from a collaboration on the drug just days after the Big Pharma had dosed the first patient in a phase 2 trial.
Undeterred by the rejection, Repare has hopes to launch a registrational trial of the lunresertib-camonsertib combo next year. The biotech is also assessing camonsertib as a monotherapy in a phase 2 trial in non-small cell lung cancer, which is due to read out next year.
The company’s phase 1 pipeline also consists of a PLK4 inhibitor called RP-1664 that is in a study for patients with TRIM37-high solid tumors along with a Polθ ATPase inhibitor called RP-3467 that is set to enter human trials in the fourth quarter.