Repare Therapeutics (RPTX) ($60MM market cap) is a clinical-stage oncology company which through a series of press releases this year announced a 75% reduction-in-force, reprioritization of their pipeline, a plan to pursue partnerships for their most advanced assets, CEO resigned (with the CFO taking over), CMO exited and most recently the out licensing of their discovery platform.
While they haven’t formally ceased development efforts and raised the white flag, that’s essentially where they’re at now. Repare might be a bit of a hidden strategic alternatives name, they haven’t announced a process cleanly in one press release. In their 3/3 press release disclosing their year-end results, they included the line:
Exploring partnerships across portfolio, including for Lunre+Camo
In their 3/31 press release announcing the resignation of their CEO and founder, the language changed to:
The Company is also exploring strategic alternatives and partnerships across its portfolio, including for lunresertib and camonsertib.
Then its tweaked slightly again in their 5/1 press release announcing the sale of their discovery platform:
“We look forward to reporting initial data from our two ongoing Phase 1 clinical trials in the second half of 2025, and continue to evaluate partnering and strategic alternatives across our portfolio assets.”
It’s possible that I’m reading too much into that strategic alternatives language and that it’s only directly tied to the pursuing partnerships objective, but this biotech trades at a significant discount to my estimate of a liquidation value with no value assigned to their IP (which they’ve used puffy language like “progress is particularly promising” and “potentially best in class” in prior statements).
So we’ve got a caretaker CEO, skeleton staff, strategic alternatives / partnership discussions, sold discovery platform, it seems to me that this one is for sale. BVF Partners is the anchor investor here with a 24% stake. I bought a few shares and added it to my broken biotech basket.
Disclosure: I own shares of RPTX