Movie review

Third Rock Ventures' preference is to fund series A rounds by itself, but the firm made an exception last week when D. E. Shaw Research participated in a $57 million financing for Relay Therapeutics Inc. The reason is D. E. Shaw has supercomputing capabilities that are a necessary ingredient in Relay's platform for studying protein motion.

Relay's goal is to develop small molecule therapeutics that bind to targets previously deemed intractable, starting in cancer. To do so, it combines biology, biophysics, computation and chemistry to essentially create video simulations of proteins as they undergo conformational changes in vivo. ...