Protein degradation company Plexium has laid off staff as part of a realignment to support the company’s pipeline, which is mostly preclinical, Fierce Biotech has learned.
“Plexium has enacted a plan to align internal resources to better support their advancing development stage pipeline while maintaining full drug discovery and platform technology capabilities,” a spokesperson for the company told Fierce Biotech.
The San Diego biotech declined to answer questions about the number or type of employees affected.
However, numerous employees, including associate, senior and principal scientists, shared LinkedIn posts this week announcing they’d been impacted by a reduction in force at Plexium.
“Unfortunately, my biggest fear has come true,” a senior scientist wrote on LinkedIn. “As I was preparing to go on maternity leave, my company underwent a major reorganization, and my position was eliminated.”
Plexium’s cancer-focused pipeline includes one phase 1 asset, the molecular glue PLX-4545, while the biotech’s other five wholly owned candidates are preclinical or discovery-stage.
Plexium is several years out from a red-hot 2022 that saw the company ink drug discovery deals with Amgen and AbbVie. Those deals came around the same time the biotech pocketed a $102 million raise.
More recently, the firm gave multiple presentations at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in April, including phase 1 data for PLX-4545. Plexium began dosing in the phase 1 trial in December 2023. PLX-4545 is designed to degrade the transcription factor IKZF2, which helps cancers avoid the immune system by recruiting immunosuppressive regulatory T cells (PDF).
Novartis is also running a phase 1 trial of its own IKZF2 degrader in 98 patients with non-small cell lung cancer or melanoma who have received prior anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy. That trial began in May 2019 and is set to wrap up around September of this year.