Fauna Brain enhances company’s ability to identify drug targets based on disease resistant traits found in nature’s most resilient mammals.
Longevity biotech Fauna Bio today launched a new AI platform developed to accelerate drug discovery by drawing on the unique biology of highly resilient mammalian species. Dubbed “Fauna Brain”, the platform builds on the company’s original Convergence discovery engine, expanding its capacity to quickly and efficiently identify novel therapeutic targets.
Based in Emeryville, California, Fauna leverages comparative genomics to reveal disease-resistant traits found in animals that have evolved extreme physiological adaptations, including species capable of hibernation, regeneration, and those resistant to cancer, fibrosis and metabolic disorders. The company has assembled a wealth of data across hundreds of species, encompassing over 46 billion sequence reads and thousands of omics datasets, as it seeks to identify conserved genetic mechanisms that are often overlooked in datasets focused solely on human biology.
Fauna Brain integrates data from the company’s core Convergence platform, using AI to map protective animal traits against human disease pathways to reveal high-potential therapeutic targets that score well for safety, efficacy and druggability. Described as a “multi-agent” system, Fauna Brain autonomously handles complex tasks traditionally carried out by specialized scientific teams, including the identification and prioritization of drug targets, synthesis of supporting evidence and the generation of concept sheets that outline therapeutic mechanisms and risk-benefit profiles.
“Fauna Brain represents a major leap forward in how we translate animal resilience into human therapeutics,” Fauna CEO Ashley Zehnder told us, explaining that the platform goes beyond data analysis to “autonomously drive target discovery from hypothesis to therapeutic rationale.”
According to Fauna, the new platform is able to evaluate individual drug targets in roughly 2.5 minutes, at an average cost of just one cent. The system’s ability to process multiple targets in parallel greatly expands the number of candidates Fauna Bio can evaluate, and the company says it has already identified two targets that have progressed into collaborative research programs with a “large pharma partner.”
“The fact that two of our Fauna Brain-identified targets have already been approved for work plans by a large pharma partner speaks to the translational power of the platform,” Zehnder told us. “As we continue to expand its capabilities, Fauna Brain is positioning us to unlock therapeutic insights across new disease areas with unprecedented speed and precision.”
Fauna, which recently revealed its first development candidate will target heart failure, has an internal development pipeline includes programs in cardiovascular disease, neuroprotection, obesity and retinal degeneration. The company’s unique approach has already attracted the interest of Big Pharma, with a collaboration with Lilly said to be worth a potential $494 million.
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