Rapt Therapeutics is slashing its headcount by 40% to extend its cash runway, just months after it ended Phase 2 studies of its lead immunology candidate, zelnecirnon.
The California biotech plans to lay off 47 employees, according to a Friday SEC filing. The workforce cuts should be complete by the end of the third quarter and will incur just short of $1 million in charges. At the end of March, Rapt had $141.6 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, as well as working capital worth $127.2 million, according to a separate SEC filing.
The layoffs come after the company’s Phase 2 studies of zelnecirnon in asthma and atopic dermatitis were put on clinical hold earlier this year after a case of liver failure in an atopic dermatitis patient with a “particularly complex medical history.” In May, the company unblinded both trials. Zelnecirnon is a small molecule antagonist of CCR4.
Rapt is looking into what caused the liver failure. According to the company, it is also “working with clinical trial sites to clean the data” from the atopic dermatitis trial and expects to finish its analysis in the third quarter. In May, Stifel analysts wrote there’s a possibility that the issue is a one-off event.
Elsewhere in its clinical-stage pipeline, Rapt has an oncology candidate dubbed tivumecirnon that’s in development both as a monotherapy and in combination with Merck’s Keytruda.