Expanding the Universe of New Disease Resistance Models
Natural disease resistance is a phenomenon where species have evolved mechanisms to either prevent a disease entirely or start to develop aspects of a disease but can reverse those aspects and return to a state of health. This cladogram shows species we know to have these capabilities.
There is no one perfect animal model for human disease. Try as we might, we cannot truly “humanize” mice or any other animal to recreate a disease state. The closest we’ve come is to treat animals with the same inherited genetic defect and apply those treatments to human patients, like the success stories in the world of inherited retinal disease. At Fauna Bio, we take the opposite approach and instead learn from animals that have evolved disease resistance strategies. We take our inspiration from August Krogh, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1920 and who popularized an idea known today as Krogh’s principle. This states simply that “For many problems, there is an animal on which it can be most conveniently studied”, meaning that nature has provided us a diversity of examples of species that can show us new ways of understanding our own physiology and new ways to treat diseases. Specifically at Fauna, we're focusing on the unique physiology of hibernating species since drastic and rapid metabolic fluctuations require the animal to preserve its health to survive the winter and reproduce in the spring and help point us to new treatments for cardiovascular disease, obesity, fibrotic diseases, and many others.
To explore the full breadth of the opportunity, we created a group within Fauna Bio we’re calling the D.R.E.A.M. team; Discovery and Research in Emerging Animal Models. Part of our mission is to demonstrate the full potential of this approach by studying species with disease resistance to gain insights and discover novel treatments for human diseases. We have begun a deep dive into published results, starting with the 452 mammalian species available for genomic analysis and human comparison in our Convergence platform, and have expanded the search to 576 species based on findings in the literature. Out of 300 species reviewed thus far, over 50 species have been identified as having demonstrated evolved resistance towards one or more human disease states.
Hibernators like the fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius) and 13-lined ground squirrel (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) stand out because of the breadth of diseases they appear to be resistant to. However, several non-hibernating mammals stand out as well. For example, the pen-tailed treeshrew (Ptilocercus lowii) and dwarf hamsters (Phodpus campbelli) have adapted resistance to the consequences of orally ingesting alcohol. In another example, the grasshopper mouse (Onychomys) has a remarkable protective mechanism against the pain from the venom of a scorpion’s sting. We can learn their secrets and apply them to novel therapies. The promising strength of potential in this approach to improve human health becomes exciting when you take a step back and realize there are millions of un-studied species on this planet, many of which will have developed strong protection against diseases that devastate us, humans.