A Seattle-based startup, Talus Bioscience, raised $9.75 million in funding to help advance its drug discovery platform to find compounds affecting gene activity, which have been linked to cancer.
Alex Federation and Lindsey Pino founded Talus in 2020 after partnering on a research project while at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences and the University of Washington, respectively. They were inspired by the growing amount of biotechs with leaders who developed their own technology, noting the “different culture of founder-led companies” present in Seattle.
“Over time we were able to meet some of those people and learn about the fact that this [scientific founder-led model] is becoming more common in biology,” said Federation.
Following this funding round, the company is in the “early exploration” stage of forming partnerships with biopharma companies and is also working on its own drug targets.