Fauna Bio Launches Fauna Brain AI Platform To Accelerate Drug Discovery Inspired By Nature's Most Resilient Species
Emeryville, CA (BUSINESS WIRE) - Fauna Bio, a biotechnology company harnessing animal genomics to improve human health, today announced the launch of Fauna Brain™, a proprietary AI platform designed to accelerate target discovery and streamline early-stage R&D. The platform represents a major evolution of Fauna Bio’s Convergence™ discovery engine and is already delivering results in both internal programs and external pharma partnerships.
Fauna Brain is a multi-agent AI system that autonomously executes complex research tasks traditionally requiring expert teams. These include identifying and scoring drug targets, synthesizing supporting evidence, and generating detailed, literature-backed concept sheets that include mechanistic rationale and risk-benefit analyses. By integrating Fauna’s internal datasets with public databases, and scientific literature, the system dramatically reduces time and cost across discovery workflows.
Early results show Fauna Brain can score a single target in as little as 2.5 minutes at an average cost of ~$0.01. It can screen multiple targets in parallel which even further reduces the time needed to screen the thousands of candidates. This efficiency has enabled Fauna Bio to explore far more targets, faster, and at a fraction of traditional R&D costs.
Fauna Brain is powered by Convergence™, Fauna’s broader AI platform that identifies and enriches druggable human targets based on comparative genomics insights from mammals with extreme phenotypes, such as hibernators, regenerators, and species resistant to fibrosis, cancer, or metabolic dysfunction.
The system integrates data from 292 species, 24 tissues, and 21 time points, supported by more than 46 billion sequence reads and thousands of transcriptomes, proteomes, and epigenomes. Fauna Bio is part of the Zoonomia Consortium, featured in Science, which produced a whole-genome alignment across 240 mammals, giving Fauna Brain a unique vantage point for discovering conserved protective mechanisms often missed in human-only datasets.
Using its Convergence AI engines, Orca, Centaur, and Pegasus, Fauna Brain identifies protective signatures in animals, maps them to human disease pathways, and identifies the top therapeutic targets to maximize efficacy, druggability, and safety. This approach has already demonstrated translational potential: two Fauna Brain-prioritized targets have progressed into funded research collaborations with a large pharma partner.
“Fauna Brain is the next evolution for us,” said Ashley Zehnder, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder, Fauna Bio. “It allows us to bring the power of AI to bear on nature’s most resilient biology and do it at a scale and speed that wasn’t previously possible. The fact that targets prioritized by Fauna Brain are already moving into pharma-backed programs validates its impact.”
Fauna Bio’s internal pipeline includes programs in heart failure, neuroprotection, obesity, and retinal disease, with emerging applications in space health and radiation resistance. One lead candidate, Faun1083, derived from genes linked to hibernation physiology, has shown improvement in diastolic dysfunction in a preclinical model of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Other programs explore neuron survival and metabolic reprogramming under extreme conditions.
About Fauna Bio
Fauna Bio is a biotechnology company leveraging comparative genomics and artificial intelligence to discover therapeutic targets from nature’s most resilient mammals. Its Convergence™ platform integrates large-scale cross-species omics data with cutting-edge AI to translate evolutionary adaptations into human therapies. Fauna’s programs span cardiology, neuroprotection, metabolism, retinal diseases, and partnerships with global pharmaceutical companies. The company is based in Emeryville, CA. Learn more at www.faunabio.com and follow us on LinkedIn and @faunabio.
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