Fauna Bio, a pioneering biotechnology company leveraging animal genomics for drug discovery, has announced a groundbreaking collaboration with Eli Lilly, a global pharmaceutical leader. This partnership aims to discover and develop novel therapeutics for obesity, utilizing Fauna Bio’s cutting-edge Convergence™ AI platform.
Under the terms of the agreement, Fauna Bio will receive an initial upfront payment, which includes an equity investment from Eli Lilly. Furthermore, Fauna Bio is eligible to receive up to a staggering $494 million in milestone payments contingent on pre-clinical, clinical, and commercial successes, in addition to royalties from future product sales. This substantial financial commitment underscores the significant potential of Fauna Bio’s innovative approach to drug discovery.
Ashley Zehnder, CEO & Co-Founder of Fauna Bio, expressed her enthusiasm for the collaboration, stating, “We are very excited to enter into this collaboration with Lilly, which showcases the power of our Convergence™ AI platform to rapidly identify novel targets for complex disease areas of high unmet need. Lilly is a leader in obesity treatment, and our approach enables and accelerates discovery across different disease areas and modalities for our partners, who bring deep expertise in drug development.” This partnership unites Fauna Bio’s innovative technology with Eli Lilly’s extensive experience in pharmaceutical development and obesity treatment.
Fauna Bio’s proprietary Convergence™ AI platform is at the heart of this collaboration. This platform uniquely analyzes data derived from the study of hibernation biology and other extreme animal adaptations. By examining how certain animals have evolved to survive extreme conditions, Fauna Bio can identify novel drug targets for human diseases. The platform excels at pinpointing the most promising genes for therapeutic intervention across various disease areas and treatment approaches.
Ruth Gimeno, Ph.D., group vice president of diabetes, obesity, and cardiometabolic research at Lilly, highlighted the strategic importance of this partnership for Eli Lilly. “Fauna Bio brings a unique approach to the discovery of novel targets for obesity. We look forward to working with the Fauna Bio team to realize the value of their platform and discover more effective treatments for patients with obesity.” This statement emphasizes Eli Lilly’s commitment to innovation and their recognition of Fauna Bio’s unique capabilities in addressing the global challenge of obesity.
The Convergence™ AI platform is powered by extensive genomic analyses spanning 452 mammal species, including 65 hibernating species. Fauna Bio’s primary discovery biobank boasts an impressive collection of data, encompassing over 22 distinct tissue types gathered at 13 precise physiological time points from the 13-lined ground squirrel. Additionally, tissue samples from tenrecs and spiny mice further enrich this dataset. In total, Fauna Bio has amassed thousands of transcriptomes, proteomes, and epigenomes, comprising over 22 billion sequence reads.
This wealth of diverse data fuels Convergence™, the world’s first biomedical knowledge graph integrating data from both human patients and animals with natural disease resistance. Trained on this comprehensive knowledge graph, Convergence™ employs a custom Graph Neural Network (GNN) with over 980 million model parameters to select drug targets. The combination of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and unique biological data enables rapid and novel target identification, significantly accelerating the drug discovery process.
About Fauna Bio
Fauna Bio is a biotechnology company dedicated to revolutionizing drug discovery by leveraging comparative genomics and data from “extreme mammals.” These animals, capable of surviving conditions lethal to humans, offer a unique window into biological mechanisms that can be harnessed to treat human diseases. By comparing gene expression across diverse animal species, Fauna Bio unlocks insights that drive innovative approaches to human disease prevention and treatment. For further information, please visit www.faunabio.com.
Stay connected with Fauna Bio through their social media channels:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/faunabio/
Twitter: @faunabio
SOURCE Fauna Bio
