For the last six weeks, the shadow of potential layoffs has hung over Repare Therapeutics’ employees. Monday, staff learned that three-quarters of them are heading for the exits.
The biotech’s leadership revealed in early January that it has been taking another look at its portfolio and found more candidates it's willing to part ways with. Chief among them was a combination of the biotech’s PKMYT1 inhibitor lunresertib and ATR inhibitor camonsertib, dubbed Lunre+Camo.
When asked by Fierce Biotech about how staff would be impacted by these changes, Repare said at the time that “additional headcount reductions” were expected—in addition to the 25% layoffs the company had unveiled in August 2024.
Details remained vague until yesterday, when Repare’s leadership informed its staff that it would reducing its head count by 75%, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The most high-profile departure will be the biotech’s chief medical officer Maria Koehler, M.D., Ph.D.
The redundancies are expected to be completed by the fourth quarter, with Repare initially paying out around $7.3 million in severance costs as well as a further $1.4 million in combined one-time employee retention costs to the likes of Chief Financial Officer Steve Forte and Chief Scientific Officer Mike Zinda, among others.
In the longer term, the dramatically reduced head count is due to save the company about $21 million a year.
Repare had 179 full-time employees as of February 2024, of which 143 were primarily engaged in some form of R&D and 36 were focused on management or general and administrative activities.
The stripped-back Repare will be focused on its phase 1 clinical assets, namely the PLK4 inhibitor RP-1664 and the Polθ ATPase inhibitor RP-3467. RP-1664 is currently being evaluated as a monotherapy in adolescent patients with TRIM37-high solid tumors, with the study due to expand to patients with pediatric neuroblastoma later this year.
Meanwhile, Repare is dosing patients in a phase 1 study of RP-3467 alone and in combination with Lynparza in patients with ovarian cancer, breast cancer, castration-resistant prostate cancer and pancreatic adenocarcinoma, with a readout penciled in for the third quarter.
“We are focused on achieving near-term inflection points for our phase 1 clinical assets, RP-1664 and RP-3467, both of which have the potential to address significant unmet patient needs and deliver important catalysts in 2025,” Repare’s CEO Lloyd Segal said back in January. “Combined with other initiatives, these changes, which we will implement later this quarter, provide the foundation for meaningful value creation.”