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At the end of the day, humans are mammals. What Fauna is really doing is looking at ‘human’ genes that are helping these other species resist and reverse disease. We’re using extreme biology to look back at our own evolutionary history and find ‘the answer inside us’. We’re NOT putting squirrel genes into people!

Hibernators are particularly well suited for this approach because almost every major group of mammals has hibernators (including primates!). The gray mouse lemur in Madagascar hibernates pretty similarly to ground squirrels.  This means they are tapping into core mammalian genetic pathways that are very similar across very different species. This is the reason that at Fauna Bio we even have T-shirts at Fauna that say “I’m 89% squirrel”! 

To help us translate these insights into therapies for humans, we layer on many hundreds of different datasets from humans and then test our therapies in human disease models, to give us confidence that the same genes protecting ground squirrels from heart damage can protect humans in heart failure (as one example).

We are creating safer, more effective therapeutics for human diseases based on evolutionary adaptations to similar problems.

Our lead program, Faun1083, is a truly novel approach to a type of heart failure known as Heart Failure with preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF), which is about half (50%) of all heart failure cases around the world and is increasing as people get older and with obesity and metabolic disease. This is a drug that is entering the final set of safety studies (IND-enabling studies) that we need to be able to start clinical studies in humans.

This therapy came directly from learning how species like the 13-lined ground squirrel protect their hearts from damage that occurs during hibernation.

Using extreme animal physiology enables Fauna Bio to do discovery from <100 samples vs. the more than >30,000 samples we’d need to try and get similar insights from human genomics (if we could even find signal at all…).

Our lead program, Faun1083, came from a study with just 60 samples from ground squirrels, almost 3 orders of magnitude less data than you’d need from human studies. This is because we are sampling tissues at the precise times when they are repairing themselves and it makes it much more obvious what genes are involved in that protection.

We still use all that human data, but to confirm findings from the ground squirrels as we can then look at humans that have natural mutations in genes we find with our approach and ask if we see correlations to diseases like heart failure. For our lead program, Faun1083, humans with mutations in the target of that program have links to changes in heart damage markers, changes in fuel utilized by the heart and changes relating to pulmonary hypertension, a common occurrence in patients with HFpEF.

Our internal innovations team has identified > 35 other species with disease resistance traits, in diseases like neurodegeneration, metabolic disease, chronic kidney disease and even aging. The amazing pipeline and partnerships we’ve been able to build have all been from 1 species, the remarkable 13-lined ground squirrel, but its just the tip of the iceberg!