Seattle-based biotech Talus Bioscience is looking for new space after raising $11.2 million Tuesday.
The company has 17 employees, all of whom are based in Seattle at the company' s Swedish Cherry Hill campus location, said Alex Federation, Talus Bio's co-founder and CEO. He added that the company plans to have more than 20 employees a year from now.
"We're not going to grow super fast. We try to be deliberate," Federation said, adding that the company is "bursting at the seams" at its current space.
Talus Bio is looking at a variety of options and still has about seven months left on its current lease, Federation said.
Talus Bio spun out of the University of Washington and the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in 2020. Its drugs are aimed at blocking transcription factors, proteins that control genomes and can transform normal cells into cancer cells. According to Talus Bio's website, there have been more than 1,700 transcription factors identified, including 200 linked to cancer, but only 10 have approved drugs.
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Talus Bio is developing an inhibitor of the transcription factor brachyury, which is the driver of a rare malignancy near the spine called chordoma. The biotech's treatments are pre-clinical.
Talus Bio also offers what it calls its MARMOT platform, referring to "multiplexed assays for the rational modulation of transcription factors," aimed at finding new drugs to stop transcription factors from causing harm. Federation said that, in addition to growing the team, the new funding will help Talus Bio expand its pipeline.
Tuesday's raise adds to $4.3 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and Washington state's Andy Hill Cancer Research Endowment Fund that Talus Bio landed in August of last year.
Two Bear Capital led Tuesday's funding round, while WRF Capital, NFX, YC Continuity Fund, Funders Club VC and BoxOne Ventures participated. Two Bear has invested in biotechs like Montara Therapeutics, which is focused on neurological diseases, and Leapfrog Bio, which is focused on cancer. Talus Bio has raised $19.7 million in venture funding total.
Looking ahead, Federation said a major milestone for Talus Bio is getting its molecules into patients.
"The other big accelerant that we are going to be pushing for over the next couple of years is finding some pharma partnerships to help bring their expertise around the table for these molecules," Federation said.
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