Talus Announces Close of Seed Funding Round and Hires New COO

Talus Bioscience is a Seattle-based biotech startup that has developed a platform called MARMOT to discover drugs that target transcription factors, which are proteins that interact with DNA and turn genes on and off. Transcription factors are involved in many diseases, especially cancer, but most of them are hard to drug because they have no clear binding sites for small molecules. Talus Bioscience can measure the amount of transcription factors that are stuck to the DNA inside the cell, and use this information to identify and test potential drugs that can knock them off the DNA, effectively switching off disease-causing genes.