Taligen – Articulating the Complement System

Co-founders of Taligen Therapeutics, Dr.’s Woody Emlen and Mike Holers recently took home the University of Colorado’s Tech Transfer Office Proof-of-Concept (POC) competition. The POC fund program makes seed stage investments ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 in start-up companies based on promising CU technologies. Each spring and fall a distinguished panel of VC’s contribute to the TTO POC selection process after the field has been narrowed to a select set of finalists.

Taking home this award has served to validate the importance of such seed stage resources as Taligen has been empowered to secure follow-on financings thanks in part to the POC award enabling the achievement of certain subsequent milestones.

Taligen is focused upon serious inflammatory disease, and based upon a needs analysis, the competitive landscape and pre-clinical data the areas of asthma, traumatic brain injury and autoimmune disease are leading the product development charge. Taligen is employing technologies that manipulate the complement proteins of the immune system which inhibit inflammation and target inhibitors of inflammation to specific sites of tissue injury.

The complement system is a cascade of proteins in the blood that are activated when needed to aid in the desruction of invaders and elimination of certain materials from the body. When the complement pathway is compromised, from events like malfunctioning regulatory protein action or inappropriate activation, the resultant effect may play a role in tissue-damaging inflammation which then yields a variety of disease. An analogy may be that antibodies function as a bodily alert system while complement functions as a bodily elimination system.

Researchers at Taligen are accelerating potential treatment options for combating inflammation as the initiation of Phase I human clinical trial is being prepared for. Oh, and was it mentioned that the company’s technology may be applied to multiple inflammatory diseases...sheer talus at Taligen.

For investor information contact me or Woody Emlen, MD.

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