Talus Bio’s Next Chapter for Transcription Factor Therapeutics
Company Update [Q4 2024]
Welcome to Talus Bio’s Quarterly Update!
You’re receiving this newsletter because you expressed interest in staying informed about Talus Bio’s progress. We’ve had an exciting few months filled with groundbreaking results, new leadership, and significant progress towards our mission to bring forward a new wave transcription factor therapeutics.
Talus Bio is unlocking a new class of medicines — the 98% of cancer-associated transcription factors (TFs) long considered “undruggable.” Despite their potential, TF drugs have largely eluded the pharmaceutical industry, even though previous TF-drugs like Revlimid ($120B LTV) and enzalutamide ($50B LTV) have made a transformative impact.
We built a proprietary AI-driven discovery platform to identify and optimize TF modulators in their native cellular environment, overcoming the decades-old limitations that have hindered progress in this space.
$11.2M Financing Fuels Discovery
Talus Bio recently closed $11.2M in additional financing, led by Two Bear Capital and supported by a stellar group of new and existing investors including WRF Capital, NFX, YCombinator, BoxOne, and others. J. Seth Stratton, Managing Partner at Two Bear Capital will join the Talus Bio board in conjunction with this financing.
This capital empowers us to accelerate deployment of our AI-powered MARMOT platform, which integrates machine learning and next-gen proteomics to unlock drug targets previously considered “undruggable”. With these resources, we’re expanding our world-class team and broadening our pipeline of transcription factor therapeutics for new targets in oncology and beyond.
Gaelle Mercenne, PhD, Joins as Head of Biology to Drive Discovery
We’re excited to announce a key addition to the Talus Bio team — Dr. Gaelle Mercenne, a trailblazer at the intersection of AI and drug discovery. Coming from a leadership role at Sumitomo Pharma and previous experience as the first scientist hired at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Gaelle will accelerate our previously “undruggable” transcription factor programs towards the clinic. Her deep expertise in pushing AI-driven discovery to unlock novel therapies makes her the perfect fit to lead the next phase of our development, expanding our preclinical efforts across high-impact targets.
Brachyury Inhibitor Shows First Activity in Lung Cancer
TAL-061 is a first-in-class inhibitor of the previously undraggable “Brachyury” transcription factor. Brachyury was identified over 50 years ago as the bona fide diver of a rare spinal cord sarcoma (chordoma). Earlier this year, TAL-061 was shown to block growth of patient-derived chordoma tumors grown in mice.
Recently, TAL-061 was tested in an in vivo mouse model of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with high brachyury expression (which occurs in 45% of all NSCLC patients). In this study, we observed robust single-agent activity for TAL-061, with stronger effects than standard-of-care first line therapy. This was the first demonstration of in vivo efficacy of a Brachyury inhibitor in NSCLC. Further studies will investigate Brachyury inhibition in combination with standard of care therapies in NSCLC.
These results represent a significant advancement, positioning TAL-061 as a potential breakthrough therapy for chordoma patients who have access to no FDA-approved drugs, as well as a new approach to address the most deadly form of cancer in NSCLC.