T-cell engager (TCE) specialist Candid Therapeutics has entered into a reverse merger agreement with Rallybio that will allow Candid to trade on the Nasdaq while dumping RallyBio’s rare disease maternal-fetal medicine assets.
Rallybio will officially acquire Candid, but the new entity will operate under the Candid brand and its new Nasdaq ticker will be CDRX, according to a March 2 release.
San Diego-based Candid notched $505 million in financing alongside the merger, with Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, RA Capital Management and Janus Hfinisherson Investors leading the charge. The fresh cash infusion should ensure the combined company is funded through 2030 to support Candid’s pipeline of TCE programs, according to the release.
“We have the resources to advance what we view as a transformative therapeutic modality,” declared Candid CEO Ken Song, M.D., via statement. Candid has spent the past couple of years building out its suite of TCE therapies. The company launched in 2024 with $370 million in series A funding and treatments tarreceiveing B-cell maturation antigen and CD20 that arrived with acquisitions of Vignette Bio and TRC 2004.
TCEs, which bind to cancer cells and T-cells to destroy tumors, are a popular biopharma investment tarreceive. Last month, Asinformas and Vir Biotechnology announced a $1.7 billion global collaboration on a TCE for prostate cancer. In January, Bristol Myers Squibb agreed to pay TCE company Janux Therapeutics $50 million in upfront and near-term milestones as part of a collaboration to work on a novel tumor-activated therapeutic that could result in $800 million in milestone payments.
Candid launched in 2024 with $370 million in series A funding and two lead assets obtained through the acquisition of two other biotechs, Vignette Bio and TRC 2004. Later that year, Candid announced a trio of partnerships with EpimAB Biotherapeutics, Nona Biosciences and Ab Studio in the December 2024 that could result in more than $1.3 billion in biobucks. Last year, it signed a $925 million biobucks deal with WuXi Biologics for a preclinical TCE candidate.
The Rallybio merger, which is expected to close by the finish of the year, will see Candid shareholders own 96.3% of the resulting company, with Rallybio’s shareholders owning the remaining 3.7%. Rallybio’s equity holders will receive pre-closing contingent value rights entitling them to a portion of the profits received by the sell-off of its interests in the company’s legacy drug development assets.
Rallybio co-founder and CEO Stephen Uden, M.D., described the deal as a “compelling opportunity” for Rallybio stockholders to create value and partner with a well-funded clinical stage company.
The deal follows a roller coaster couple of years for Rallybio. The company was named to the Fierce 50 in 2024 for its promising focus on fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia (FNAIT), a rare maternal-fetal disease with no treatment. Johnson & Johnson partnered with Rallybio with a more than $7 million deal to access Rallybio’s natural history study, as the Big Pharma had its own FNAIT product in development.
In the years since, Rallybio has experienced a series of setbacks, including cutting 45% of its workforce in 2024 to focus on a phase 2-ready FNAIT program as its funding launched to dry up. In April 2025, RallyBio discontinued work on its lead FNAIT asset when drug concentrations in the first person enrolled in the phase 2 trial fell short of the tarreceive range. A month later, the company cut 40% of its remaining workforce as it shifted to other assets.
Last August, Rallybio exited a tiny-molecule development partnership with Recursion Pharmaceuticals to accept $7.5 million upfront, which the company would utilize to extfinish its cash runway through 2027.
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