AI platform detects new drug targets in minutes

Fauna Bio has announced the launch of Fauna Brain, a new AI platform designed to accelerate drug target discovery and streamline early-stage research and development. Building on the company’s existing discovery engine, Fauna Brain has already begun producing results in both internal programs and active collaborations with pharmaceutical partners.

“Fauna Brain is the next evolution for us. It allows us to bring the power of AI to bear on nature’s most resilient biology and do it at a scale and speed that wasn’t previously possible,” said Dr Ashley Zehnder, CEO and Co-Founder of Fauna Bio. “The fact that targets prioritized by Fauna Brain are already moving into pharma-backed programs validates its impact.”

Multi-agent AI that works like an expert team

Fauna Brain is a multi-agent AI system that automates research workflows typically handled by highly specialised human teams. It can autonomously identify and score potential drug targets, synthesise diverse data sources and generate comprehensive concept sheets.

By fusing Fauna’s internal datasets with public resources and literature, the platform significantly cuts both time and cost from early-stage R&D efforts.

The system is also extremely efficient. It can score a single target in as little as 2.5 minutes at an average cost of just ~$0.01, and it’s capable of screening thousands of targets in parallel. This level of performance has allowed Fauna Bio to vastly expand the scope of its research, exploring a greater range of candidates at a fraction of traditional costs.

Convergence™: biology’s hidden clues unlocked by AI

At the heart of Fauna Brain is Convergence, Fauna Bio’s broader AI infrastructure that mines the genomes of mammals with extraordinary traits. These are mammals such as hibernators, regenerators and species that naturally resist cancer, fibrosis, or metabolic dysfunction.

The platform draws from a massive comparative dataset comprising 292 species, 24 tissues, and 21 time points, powered by over 46 billion sequence reads. As a member of the Zoonomia Consortium, Fauna Bio also benefits from a high-resolution alignment of 240 mammalian genomes – offering evolutionary insights missed in human-only datasets.

Translating nature’s secrets into human therapies

Fauna Brain incorporates three AI engines – Orca, Centaur, and Pegasus – to identify protective genetic signatures in animals and map them onto human disease pathways. These insights are used to pinpoint top therapeutic targets and to optimise efficacy, safety, and druggability.

This strategy is already proving fruitful, as two Fauna Brain-prioritised targets have moved into funded research collaborations with a major pharmaceutical company.

Fauna Brain is proving to not be just another AI tool – it represents a new avenue in how drug discovery can leverage the secrets of nature, interpreted and accelerated through AI.