Talus Bioscience on Tuesday announced $11.2 million in venture capital funding to advance its drug discovery program for hard-to-treat diseases.
The Seattle biotech’s platform brings biochemical analysis into living cells, allowing researchers to see how drugs interact with small proteins that turn genes on and off. Abnormal gene expression is a common point of origin of many diseases, including cancer.
Co-founders Alex Federation and Lindsay Pino teamed up to form Talus in 2020. Pino was a graduate student at the University of Washington, and Federation was a postdoctoral fellow at Seattle’s Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences. The duo went looking for a way to make drugs that target gene-regulating proteins, which are often considered “undruggable.”
Federation and Pino received an initial $255,000 small business grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by several rounds of venture capital funding, amounting to $7.3 million in grant funds and an additional $19.7 million from venture capital firms to date. The startup has 17 employees.
Talus will use the new funds to advance an existing drug discovery program and expand the reach of its proprietary platform, called Multiplexed Assays for the Rational Modulation of Transcription Factors (MARMOT).
MARMOT helps researchers circumvent some of the major challenges associated with studying gene regulator proteins that don’t hold up well when removed from the cell, which is the standard way to isolate a specific component for study. Instead, the platform clears irrelevant contents from the cell, leaving just DNA and the proteins attached to it. Talus then uses machine learning tools to analyze the proteins.
Its platform searches for transcription factors, which oversee the production of other proteins by attaching to DNA and initiating gene expression. Many diseases result from the over-expression of certain genes, sort of like a copy machine can get jammed if left on.
Talus is trying to develop drugs that turn genes off by knocking the transcription factor free. The company has identified four targets, including a transcription factor called Brachyruy that drives a rare bone cancer found near the spine.
The $11.2 million will help advance the Brachyruy program and another program involving a transcription factor linked to prostate cancer. The seed investment round was led by Two Bear Capital, with participation from WRF Capital, NFX, YC Continuity Fund, Funders Club VC and BoxOne Ventures.
When they launched Talus four years ago, Federation and Pino were inspired by other founder-led companies in Seattle. Federation is a biochemist and computational biologist and Pino studied biochemistry and machine learning.
Last month, Talus was among the companies referenced in a report by World Industry News on proteomics research, the field designation for protein analysis. The document stated that the proteomics market was worth $36.8 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $72.9 billion by 2028.
https://ift.tt/ka1NZKl August 20, 2024 at 12:00PM GeekWire
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