Fauna Bio: finding human drug targets using animal omics data

Fauna Bio is taking a comparative genomics approach to drug discovery, using data from “extreme mammals” — those capable of surviving conditions or physiological events that would be lethal to humans — to identify drug targets to treat human disease. 

CEO Ashley Zehnder, a former veterinarian with a Ph.D. in cancer biology, told BioCentury the company’s comparative genetics approach allows for the discovery of genes that nature has selected to be important, which provides more insight than studying the human genome in isolation...