Bayer AG has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Dewpoint Therapeutics Inc. for a heart disease program to treat dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) patients characterized by specific mutations.

Dewpoint Therapeutics Inc. and Chemify Ltd. have partnered to develop a suite of digitally discovered and automatically synthesized novel molecules on Chemify’s programmable chemistry platform against condensate targets of interest in Dewpoint’s oncology and neurodegeneration pipeline.

Gut bacteria used liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) to organize themselves into condensates, which allowed them to adapt to nutrient deprivation, enabling them to colonize the gut. In experiments reported in the March 17, 2023, issue of Science, investigators showed that a mutant of the beneficial gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron was “highly defective in competitiveness, in its ability to colonize the mammalian gut,” senior author Eduardo Groisman told BioWorld. “Our paper provides the first example in which [LLPS] matters in bacterial host interactions.”

Be it heart disease or liver disease, researchers and clinicians are well used to thinking about disease at the level of organs.

Startup Faze Medicines Inc. launched in early December with a series A funding of $81 million, and an A list of investors, led by Third Rock Ventures – an indicator of the attention condensates are attracting from the biopharma industry. Faze CSO Rachel Meyers, though, named another indicator for condensates’ blue-ribbon status: rumors have it that the 7th edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell – a workhorse textbook for 30 years’ worth of students in the field – will be the first to include information on condensates.