Invivo Ventures is leading a funding round of 4.1 million Euros in the biotechnology company Telum Therapeutics. The operation was advised by Intelectium Funding Accelerator, who worked with the entrepreneurs, Roberto Diez and Rubén Diez, from the design phase of the company's business strategy to the closing of the transaction. Clave Capital and Cdti-Innvierte have also participated in the transaction.
Telum Therapeutics is working to develop an alternative to chemical antibiotics to solve the problem of bacterial multiresistance. Antibiotics are medicines that fight bacterial diseases. Excessive use of them can cause bacteria to generate resistance, that is, to mutate or transform and that antibiotics lose their effectiveness. These resistant bacteria are very difficult to treat, and that is why an increasing number of infections are causing death in hospitals around the world. Roberto Diez, CEO of Telum, has been a researcher at Rockefeller University in the USA and has very specific expertise in the generation of enzymbiotics. The latter are lytic enzymes of bacteriophages that kill bacteria in a very specific way. The phage, after its replication within the host, faces the problem of leaving the bacteria to disseminate its progeny. To address this, phages have developed a lytic system that weakens the bacterial cell wall, resulting in bacterial lysis. Phage lytic enzymes, or lysines, are highly efficient molecules that have been perfected through millions of years of evolution for this purpose. The company develops the basis of its potential product portfolio on an internal technological platform, developed by obtaining bacteria extracted from caves unexplored to date, giving it the ability to generate not only its own bacteriophage library from these samples, but also its own enzyme platform. Telum's main program Therapeutics, IKB206, is a new investigational therapy aimed at infections caused by multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli. IKB206 uses a genetic modification that gives it the ability to act specifically and quickly against strains of Escherichia coli with different degrees of resistance to conventional antibiotics. The company plans to begin the first clinical trials with IKB206 in patients at the end of 2022. Telum Therapeutics will use the funds raised in the funding round to advance to clinical phases in one of its candidates against infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria and a second compound with a wider range of action to advanced pre-clinical phases.
