The vet who looked at a hibernating squirrel and saw a pharmacy. Co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, she reads 80 million years of evolution for drugs that already work.
Most drug discovery starts with a sick mouse in a lab. Ashley Zehnder starts somewhere stranger: a 13-lined ground squirrel that drops its heart to a few beats a minute, triples its body fat, shrugs off insulin resistance, and wakes up in spring with no damage done.
That animal solved problems pharma has chased for decades - obesity, muscle wasting, metabolic collapse - and it did it across millions of years of evolution. Zehnder's company, Fauna Bio, exists to find those solutions in the genomes of "extreme mammals" and translate them into targets for human drugs.
It is a contrarian bet, and she knows it. The entire biomedical machine was built around a handful of standard lab species. Fauna Bio looks at the other 6,000-plus mammals - the ones that hibernate, regenerate, resist disease - and asks what they know that we forgot.
How did we figure out that genes cause cancers? It wasn't by studying human cancer. It was by studying the Rous Sarcoma Virus.- Ashley Zehnder, on why animals matter to medicine
Picture the scene. A Stanford PhD interview. The candidate is a boarded avian veterinarian who has, in the course of her work, given chemotherapy to a red-lored Amazon parrot.
A senior cancer-biology faculty member studies her resume, looks genuinely puzzled, and asks the question that would reroute her life:
"Birds... get cancer?"
The disbelief in that question landed hard. Here was one of the smartest people in oncology, and he had no idea that a parrot could grow a tumor - or that studying it might matter. Zehnder realized the biomedical research complex rested on a quiet, flawed assumption: that only humans suffer "human" diseases.
She has spent the years since closing that gap. Animal medicine and human medicine, she argues, are very often the same thing wearing different fur.
"A melanoma in a dog doesn't behave the same as it does in a corn snake or on the toe of a rabbit." Same disease, different rules - and the differences are where the medicine hides.
She volunteered at a vet clinic as a child - the antiseptic smell, the anxious dogs and cats - and decided then to "speak for the animals that cannot speak for themselves." She entered vet school at the University of Florida at 20.
During deep torpor, the 13-lined ground squirrel becomes a different machine. Then it reverses every change without harm. Fauna Bio reads the genes that flip those switches.
SOURCE: Fauna Bio research on the 13-lined ground squirrel - the company's emblem of "extreme mammals."
An animal biobank captures tissue and omics data from extreme mammals - hibernators, regenerators, the disease-resistant.
The Convergence platform uses graph neural networks across genomics, proteomics and transcriptomics to find traits conserved all the way to humans.
The Centaur knowledge graph links extreme animal traits to human disease pathways, surfacing targets a drug could actually hit.
The biomedical research complex was built on a flawed assumption: that only humans suffer "human" diseases.- Ashley Zehnder, on the gap between animal and human medicine
If a squirrel can survive five months of near-stillness without losing bone, muscle or its mind, that talent is worth a lot to a space agency planning a trip to Mars.
Fauna Bio's hibernation science drew NASA funding through the STASH project - Studying Torpor in Animals for Space-Health in Humans - which explores whether torpor could protect the body during long-duration spaceflight, including against the bone loss, muscle wasting and cosmic radiation that make deep space so hostile.
The same biology that could treat obesity on Earth might one day let humans sleep their way across the solar system.
Potential payoffs of human torpor under study: preserved muscle and bone despite immobilization, lower resource needs on long missions, and possible protection against galactic cosmic radiation - tested at a NASA-funded neutron facility at Colorado State.
A child healer became an exotic-animal vet, became a cancer biologist, became the CEO arguing that evolution is the best drug-discovery lab ever built.
How did we figure out that genes cause cancers? It wasn't by studying human cancer; it was by studying the Rous Sarcoma Virus.
A melanoma in a dog doesn't behave the same as it does in a corn snake or on the toe of a rabbit.
I wanted to speak for the animals that cannot speak for themselves and become a healer.
The biomedical research complex was built on a flawed assumption: that only humans suffer "human" diseases.
Fauna Bio was born in a Stanford lab from three complementary minds. Zehnder brought the clinical eye of a veterinarian. Katie Grabek, the CSO, brought a PhD in human medical genetics and years studying the proteomics of hibernation. Linda Goodman, the CTO, brought computational biology from Cambridge and Harvard and time at the Broad Institute reading mammalian genomes.
Together they pitched a then-radical idea: that data from "non-traditional animal models" could improve human health. The investor base that bought in skews toward longevity and deep tech - the same circles that backed Loyal, Rubedo, Mammoth Biosciences and BillionToOne.
SF Business Times "Women Who Lead in Life Sciences." An "Emerging Woman Founder in Bio" from the Wave Summit. The face of Fauna Bio for the Fortune AI Minute. Mentor to founders through On Deck Longevity Biotech and Nucleate Bio.
The bench includes Broad Institute vertebrate-genomics director Dr. Elinor Karlsson and veteran hibernation researcher Dr. Sandy Martin - people who already speak the language of extreme mammals.