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Faze Medicines Quietly Shuts Down

November 9, 2022

Marie Daghlian

Two years after launching with $81 million in a series A funding round to leverage a fundamentally new understanding of the biology of biomolecular condensates to develop therapies to slow, halt, or reverse disease pathology, the company quietly shut down, first reported by STAT news and employees’ posts on LinkedIn.

Faze launched during boom times for biotech and struggled for funding in 2022’s bear market, among of the myriad of small companies considering strategic alternatives to stay afloat.

Faze was founded by four Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators that are renowned scientific leaders in the field of biomolecular condensates, membrane-less clusters of molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids that dynamically organize to perform a wide array of cell functions. Research over the past decade, including seminal work by Faze’s founders, has found that disturbances in the behavior of condensates play a causative role in myriad human diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Faze was conducting preclinical research in two initial therapeutic focus areas—the rare neurological diseases amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1)—as well as research to explore condensate biology in other disease areas. In ALS and DM1, a robust body of literature points to a causative role for condensate dysregulation. Leveraging state-of-the-art screening and proteomics techniques, Faze set out to identify proteins that are key components or regulators of disease-causing condensates, and then employ proprietary assays to discover small molecule drugs targeting these proteins.

Photo: Philip Vickers, president and CEO at Faze Medicines

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