Talus Bio

United States - Seattle, WA

• 21/08/2024
• Seed
• $11,200,000

Talus Bioscience is a venture-backed early-stage biotechnology startup company working on drug development for gene regulators. Talus Bio spun out of two leading institutions in September 2020 (University of Washington and Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences) and is located in Seattle, WA. We are building a data-enabled drug development platform that will focus primarily on small-molecule drug development in oncology.

Talus Bio's platform measures a drug’s ability to disrupt a gene regulator within its natural, non-engineered cellular environment. Furthermore, a single experiment using the platform measures activity for about 1,000 gene regulators simultaneously, providing information on in-cell drug activity and specificity in a single experiment. To accomplish this, we combine innovative cell processing with high-sensitivity quantitative proteomics and advanced downstream analytics.

As a company, Talus Bio focuses on two parallel efforts to prove that our technology can open up the world of gene regulation for drug discovery:

- Developing internal programs against previously undruggable gene regulators in
cancers with poor standard of care
- Partnering with pharma, biotech, and academic labs to help progress their pipeline of gene regulator drugs

Related People

Alex FederationCo Founder

United States - Seattle, Washington

I'm a scientist studying how cancer drugs work within complex cellular networks and how to discover new drugs most efficiently.

In previous research, I've
- Developed and released software to model transcriptional networks that has been used for drug re-purposing in cancer and understanding cell of origin for rare cancer types.
- Analyzed real-world clinical EMR data to understand clinical responses to immunotherapy
- Led a small team engineering new gene editing reagents for applications in T cell therapy.
- Developed a new, highly scalable proteomics method to to measure DNA-bound protein complexes at a systems level
- Characterized the response of human immune cells to next-generation BET inhibitors to prioritize further clinical development
- Contributed to the screening, medicinal chemistry and cellular characterization of lead compounds that inhibit the chromatin regulators DOT1L, EZH2, CBX chromodomains, YEATS domain proteins and BET bromodomains

Competencies:
[Bioinformatics] Gene expression analysis (RNA-seq), epigenomics assays (ChIP-seq, DNAme), genome accessibility (DNaseI-seq, ATAC-seq), nascent transcription (GRO-seq), proteomics (data-independent acquisition, targeted proteomics)
[Lab] Protein biochemistry, high-throughput chemical screening, cell biology, molecular biology, mass spectrometry
[Programming] Python, R, Bash, SQL
[Data Science] numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch
[Misc] Schrödinger, Adobe Illustrator, Google Cloud, AWS, Snowflake, Tableau

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/afederation/