A Seattle biotech drugging the transcription factors an entire industry gave up on.
In a lab off 17th Avenue in Seattle, a mass spectrometer is doing something most of biology never bothered to try: measuring the proteins that switch genes on and off while they are still inside a living cell. Not purified. Not frozen. Not coaxed into a tube where they behave. Alive, in context, misbehaving in exactly the way that causes cancer.
These proteins are called transcription factors, and for decades the drug industry treated them like weather - powerful, important, and impossible to change. They have no tidy pocket to slot a pill into. They shimmer between shapes. The standard verdict was one word, delivered with a shrug: undruggable.
Talus Bio built its whole company around disagreeing with that word.
The regulome is the operating system for your genes - the collection of transcription factors and DNA regulators that decide which genes speak and which stay quiet. When that system glitches, cells forget which genes to silence, and disease follows. Talus's bet is simple to state and hard to do: if you can measure the regulome accurately, in its native cellular home, you can learn to modulate it.
The instrument that does the measuring is named MARMOT - Multiplexed Assays for the Rational Modulation Of Transcription Factors. It stitches together four disciplines that usually live in different buildings: functional proteomics, high-throughput mass spectrometry, synthetic chemistry, and machine learning. The output is a quantitative map of regulome activity, generated directly in human cells, that tells chemists which molecules actually move the needle.
The regulome has been hidden. Talus reveals it.
The discovery engine. AI, next-gen proteomics, synthetic chemistry, and computational biology interrogating drugs and gene regulators at scale.
Functional proteomics that quantifies thousands of transcription factors directly in native human cells - not a purified stand-in.
Foundation models trained on tens of millions of compound-target interactions a month, designing small molecules that shift regulome activity.
Preclinical small-molecule programs against transcription factors in chordoma (brachyury), non-small cell lung cancer, and prostate cancer.
An invitation to outside labs to use Talus's technology and help chart the human regulome - unusual candor in a tool-hoarding field.
Talus was founded in 2020 by Alex Federation and Lindsay Pino. Federation, the CEO, invented the MARMOT approach during a postdoctoral fellowship at Seattle's Altius Institute, where he trained in computational epigenomics and cancer biology alongside John Stamatoyannopoulos and genome-editing pioneer Fyodor Urnov. Before that, he earned a PhD in chemical biology at Harvard under Jay Bradner, learning to drug genome regulators.
Pino, the CTO, builds the screening platform itself - the automated proteomics sample prep and the high-throughput mass spectrometry that make the whole thing run. She trained across the Broad Institute, Penn, and the University of Washington. One founder knows what to measure; the other knows how to measure it a million times over.
CEO. Invented MARMOT. Harvard chemical biology (Bradner lab); computational epigenomics at the Altius Institute.
CTO. Leads the proteomics + mass-spec screening platform. Trained at the Broad, Penn, and UW.
Return to that lab off 17th Avenue. The mass spectrometer is still running, still watching transcription factors do their work inside living cells. But the shrug that used to accompany these proteins is gone. Where the industry saw weather, Talus built an instrument - and tens of millions of measurements a month now feed an AI that suggests, tests, and refines molecules aimed at the regulome's control room.
The programs are still preclinical. The hardest targets remain hard. Nobody at Talus is claiming a cure. What has changed is smaller and more durable than a headline: a word. “Undruggable” has stopped being a verdict and started being a question. In a Seattle lab, the lights are on, and the regulome is finally visible.
Unlock the regulome to enable drug discovery for previously undruggable targets.