comparative-genomics
(3)
Paratus Sciences
Paratus Sciences is a biotechnology company decoding the extreme biology of bats to discover first-in-class medicines. Bats live long, tolerate viruses, resist cancer, control inflammation and thrive on high-sugar diets - traits they evolved over roughly 65 million years. Paratus integrates cell biology, comparative genomics and informatics to translate these adaptations into drug targets for inflammatory and cardiometabolic diseases. Launched in 2023 with a $100M Series A and dual sites in New York and Singapore, its lead program PS-1001 is a first-in-class pan-inflammasome inhibitor.
Fauna Bio
Fauna Bio is an AI-driven drug discovery company that mines roughly 100 million years of evolved disease resistance in mammals to find new human therapies. Founded in 2018 in the San Francisco Bay Area, it combines comparative genomics, a proprietary animal biobank, and machine learning - through its Convergence and Fauna Brain platforms - to translate the biology of hibernators and other resilient species into drug targets for conditions like obesity, heart failure, neurodegeneration, and retinal disease. Its work has attracted a partnership with Eli Lilly worth up to $494 million.
Ashley Zehnder
Ashley Zehnder is the co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, a Berkeley biotech mining the genomes of hibernating ground squirrels, bears and 452 other mammal species for drugs that could treat humans. A boarded avian veterinarian with a Stanford PhD in cancer biology, she had her career epiphany while giving chemotherapy to a parrot, when a faculty member asked in disbelief, 'Birds... get cancer?' That question convinced her the wall between animal and human medicine was an illusion. Fauna Bio's Convergence AI platform turns the survival tricks of extreme mammals into therapeutic targets, work that has drawn partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and NASA-funded research into putting astronauts into a hibernation-like state.