Fauna Bio, a biotechnology company pioneering the use of animal genomics to advance human health, today announced the official launch of Fauna Brain™, an AI-powered platform built to fast-track target discovery and enhance early-stage R&D. Evolved from Fauna Bio’s original Convergence™ discovery engine, Fauna Brain is already delivering promising results across internal development efforts and in a collaborative research program with a major pharmaceutical partner.

Fauna Brain is a multi-agent AI system that autonomously executes research workflows typically requiring specialized scientific teams. These include identifying and ranking drug targets, synthesizing scientific evidence, and generating comprehensive concept sheets—complete with mechanistic explanations and risk-benefit analyses. By drawing from Fauna Bio’s proprietary datasets, as well as public resources and scientific literature, the platform dramatically cuts down both time and cost in early discovery phases.

Initial data show Fauna Brain can evaluate a single target in as little as 2.5 minutes for approximately $0.01. Its ability to screen numerous targets in parallel further slashes the time required to evaluate thousands of drug candidates. This performance advantage allows Fauna Bio to pursue a significantly broader and deeper target pipeline than would be feasible using traditional methods.

Built atop the Convergence™ platform, Fauna Brain harnesses comparative genomics from mammals with extraordinary traits—such as hibernators, regenerators, and species resistant to cancer, fibrosis, or metabolic diseases—to identify and prioritize druggable human targets. The system leverages an expansive data foundation covering 292 species, 24 tissues, and 21 time points, supported by more than 46 billion sequence reads and a vast collection of transcriptomic, proteomic, and epigenomic datasets.

Fauna Bio is also part of the Zoonomia Consortium, which created a whole-genome alignment of 240 mammalian species and was recently featured in Science. This foundational work gives Fauna Brain a unique evolutionary vantage point for identifying conserved, protective biological mechanisms often missed by human-only studies.

Using its suite of Convergence AI engines—Orca, Centaur, and Pegasus—Fauna Brain detects resilient signatures in animals, maps them to human disease pathways, and ranks therapeutic targets based on safety, druggability, and expected efficacy. Two of these targets have already advanced into pharma-funded collaborations, underscoring the platform’s real-world applicability.

“Fauna Brain is the next evolution for us,” said Ashley Zehnder, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder of 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 research initiatives in heart failure, neuroprotection, obesity, and retinal diseases, with expanding interest in space health and radiation resistance. One standout candidate, Faun1083, is based on hibernation-adapted genes and has demonstrated improvement in diastolic function in preclinical models of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Additional programs target neuron preservation and metabolic adaptation to extreme environments.

About Fauna Bio
Fauna Bio is a biotechnology company applying AI and comparative genomics to identify novel therapeutic targets based on the biology of Earth’s most resilient mammals. Its Convergence™ platform fuses large-scale omics data across species with machine learning to convert evolutionary adaptations into treatments for human diseases. Fauna Bio’s work spans cardiology, neurology, metabolism, ophthalmology, and collaborative programs with top-tier pharma companies. Headquartered in Emeryville, CA, Fauna Bio can be found online at www.faunabio.com and on LinkedIn and @faunabio.

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