Harnessing Evolution to Discover Therapies

For hundreds of millions of years, animals have depended on their innate immune systems for survival. Over that time, evolution has repeatedly tuned immune cells to withstand the harsh realities of different environments – infection, injury, and chronic stress. When it comes to resisting disease, evolution has already solved many problems for us. For example, horses have a variant of a gene we share called KEAP1 that makes them resistant to oxidative stress induced tissue damage in liver disease.

Nature has already run millions of experiments. The results are encoded in the biology of living species.

In humans, when our immune system fails to resolve inflammation, the consequences can be devastating. Chronic inflammatory and fibrotic diseases drive organ failure across the liver, lung, kidney, and heart. Millions of patients progress to irreversible damage because there are no therapies that restore tissue function at advanced stages.

At the center of this failure are macrophages – innate immune cells that orchestrate inflammation and tissue repair. In disease, macrophages become trapped in a destructive state, perpetuating inflammation and fibrosis instead of restoring healthy tissue.

But what if we could learn from evolution’s solutions?

What if we could take the liver resilience of horses, or the inflammation resistance of a naked mole-rat, and translate those superpowers into human therapies?

At Intertwined Biosciences, we are building a new approach to drug discovery at the intersection of evolutionary biology, AI, and innate immune therapy.

We treat mammalian evolution as a vast natural laboratory. By comparing immune systems across species, we identify conserved molecular mechanisms that confer disease resistance.

At the center of our AI-native approach is our Virtual Macrophage – an AI model that encodes our continuously evolving biological knowledge and orchestrates our entire discovery process. Instead of guessing blindly in a wet lab, our AI simulates millions of genetic interventions to identify precise protein edits that will flip a damaged immune cell into a tissue-repairing one. The output is a highly scalable, in vivo cell therapy.

Evolution has already done the hardest work.

Our goal is to harness the results of evolution and translate those solutions into human medicine.