Company designates target in metabolic disease partnership, leveraging biological data from hibernating squirrels.
Longevity biotech Fauna Bio has reached a milestone in its obesity research partnership with Eli Lilly, having designated a metabolic disease drug target identified through its AI discovery platform. The California-based company said the achievement triggers an undisclosed milestone payment as part of a multi-year agreement signed with Lilly in 2023, which could be worth up to $494 million.
Fauna’s broader strategy is built around the idea that studying disease-resistant traits in animals can reveal pathways that have historically proven difficult to identify. The newly designated target draws on biological insights from hibernating mammals to discover new approaches for tackling obesity.
“This target was identified through looking at unique mechanisms of metabolism and energy expenditure in the ground squirrel,” Fauna CEO Ashley Zehnder told us. “By studying how hibernating mammals achieve remarkable feats of metabolic regulation – including dramatic, healthy weight cycling – we are uncovering therapeutic targets that have eluded traditional discovery approaches.”
The company’s platform integrates genomic data from more than 450 mammalian species, including dozens that hibernate, with human clinical and genetic datasets. By combining these sources, the company aims to identify targets that are both biologically meaningful and relevant to human disease, aging and longevity.
The collaboration with Lilly is focused on obesity, an area of intense competition across the pharmaceutical industry, after the success of GLP-1 weight loss drugs sparked efforts to identify next-generation therapies that go beyond appetite suppression and address underlying metabolic mechanisms.
“There is a broad recognition that obesity affects many aspects of health and, also thus ultimately healthspan and overall longevity,” added Zehnder. “GLP-1 drugs have certainly altered the landscape, but this is a huge and diverse market and additional approaches will be needed to address the needs of all patients who could benefit from weight loss and thus improve their overall health. This program takes us another step forward in finding novel pathways to achieve that goal.”
Fauna’s approach seeks to overcome some of the limitations seen with existing treatments. One challenge in obesity care is that patients who lose significant weight often experience a reduction in metabolic rate, making it difficult to maintain weight loss over time. Hibernating mammals, by contrast, are able to modulate their metabolism in a controlled and reversible way, suggesting potential pathways for more durable interventions.
Another area of interest is the preservation of lean muscle mass. Some hibernating species remain inactive for months yet are able to rebuild muscle before emerging, a process that could inform strategies to counter muscle loss associated with weight reduction therapies.
Now that the target has been identified, Zehnder told us that “Lilly will be responsible for additional work to optimize a therapeutic that has been identified against this target and take it forward in development.”
Beyond obesity, Fauna has been exploring applications of its platform in cardiovascular and neurological diseases, where it believes its comparative genomics approach could help uncover conserved biological mechanisms that are shared across species and central to disease processes.
