Overview - Telum Therapeutics

Our science is geared towards care of human lives

Telum Therapeutics leverages the power of nature through the understanding of biological controls exerted by bacteriophages to balance bacterial ecosystems. Our technology is based on the extraction of bacterial strains from unexplored soil environments and the identification of bacteriophages, -lytic and lysogenic-, that prevail in those exotic bacterial populations.

This is the basis to develop unique phage libraries, providing us new avenues for the discovery and development of potent antibacterial agents using lytic phage enzymes as a new innovative tool to treat human infections diseases. Bacteriophage lysins have long been demonstrated to be effective enzybiotics in various infectious models.

Thanks to its modular structure, with at least two distinct domains (enzymatic hydrolysis and substrate recognition), we can combine the different modules and produce, through synthetic biology, new enzybiotics with desired properties, such as higher activity or a broader spectrum of destruction. Moreover, lysins can even be engineered to kill bacterial pathogens from without, a property that is not present in natural lysins.

Multiple types of lytic enzymes

In Telum we believe nature is wise and we learn from the best properties of natural LYSins (LYS) to select them and construct from there, engineered phage lytic enzymes (EPLEs) with enhanced antimicrobial activities. NPLEs are phage produced by the phage during the infection cycle or form part of the virion structure, and are responsible for degradation of the peptidoglycan layer of the host bacterium in two important steps, lysis from without inyecting the genome of the phage and the lysis from withtin at the end of the lytic cycle to release new viral progeny.

EPLEs are engineered proteins result as combination of different activity modules, that confers the final synthetic product enhanced antimicrobial activity or resistance to hazardous environmental conditions, or an advantage when treating an infection.

FRANK are modifications of the most active candidates to create a consensus sequences using what is usually found in nature.

By connecting chemistry and physics of proteins with machine learning, Telum is leveraging the combinative potential of LYS and protein engineering to advance in new research.