animal genomics for human health
Very little changed. Fauna Bio kept the same core bet from January 26, 2021 to January 14, 2022: human-only genetics is too cramped a search strategy, while animal biology contains stronger signals worth stealing for medicine. Hibernators and other unusually resilient mammals remain the stars of the show. What did shift is the framing. The 2021 version is more genetic and argumentative: human GWAS finds lots of tiny effects, while rare large protective mutations are hard to catch in people, so go look in animals instead. The 2022 version broadens that into a drug-discovery thesis, adding functional genomics, conserved pathways, and a cleaner story about translating extreme mammalian adaptations into human therapeutics. What stayed stable is the actual mechanism of belief: identify protective genes or networks in animals, map them to human biology, then turn that into targets and drugs. No real retreat, no obvious pivot, no dramatic rewrite. Just the same thesis with better polish and a wider disease list. Evidence is thin on one important point: this timeline shows messaging, not proof. It tells us how the company explained itself, not whether the animal-to-human translation pipeline worked in practice. So the honest read is continuity with modest sharpening, not a substantive change in doctrine.