Traditionally, one of the biggest challenges in developing innovative and effective therapeutics has been the high cost of clinical trials, along with limited understanding of the mechanisms behind many diseases. But readers, stress no more, because Fauna Bio is tackling exactly that.

Fauna Bio is a biotechnology company that uses comparative animal genomics to generate pharmaceutical insights into human health. Unlike other AI biotech companies that typically run millions of wet lab experiments and spend over $100 million to get assets into the clinic, Fauna uses evolutionary insights and spends less than $500,000 to discover new drugs using in silico models.

Before we dive in, what is comparative genomics? It's the study of similarities and differences in DNA sequences across diverse species. On June 16, 2025, Fauna announced Fauna Brain™, a platform designed to accelerate R&D using a multi-agent AI system that performs tasks usually done by expert research teams. This shows the potential of Agentic AI, where systems can evaluate thousands of biological pathways and independently choose the most promising targets. The speed and cost advantages are real—initial results show that it can analyze one target in under three minutes for less than one cent.

The platform runs on Fauna’s proprietary AI system, Convergence™, which draws from evolutionary and comparative genomics data. It focuses especially on mammals with extreme traits, like species that are resistant to cancer, to identify potential drug targets in humans. Fauna’s efficiency comes from using domain-specific, composable models. Compared to massive general-purpose models like AlphaFold or GPT, these smaller models are optimized for specific biological tasks.

Fauna Brain™, developed in collaboration with the Zoonomia Consortium, includes data from 292 animals, 24 tissue types, and 21 time points. It contains over 46 billion DNA sequence reads, along with thousands of epigenomes, proteomes, and transcriptomes.