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.”
