Mining Evolution for Medicine

Ninety percent of drugs fail in clinical trials — a staggering attrition rate that costs billions and leaves patients waiting. The fundamental problem is that most drug candidates are designed from scratch, with no guarantee they will work in the complex environment of the human body. Ditto Bio is taking a radically different approach: starting from molecules that evolution has already optimized over millions of years.

The company mines the genomes of viruses, ticks, and parasitic worms to discover proteins that naturally suppress the human immune system. These organisms have evolved sophisticated molecular tools to evade and modulate human immunity — tools that Ditto Bio is now engineering into drugs for autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.

What They're Building

Ditto Bio's AI platform has analyzed more than one million proteins from parasites, identifying thousands that hit validated immune targets at 1–2 nanomolar affinity. Remarkably, 98% of these proteins were previously uncharacterized — a vast, untapped reservoir of potential therapeutics that conventional drug discovery has overlooked entirely.

The approach mirrors some of medicine's greatest breakthroughs. Aspirin came from willow bark. Penicillin came from mold. GLP-1 receptor agonists came from Gila monster venom. Ditto Bio is applying this biology-first philosophy systematically, using computational tools to search across the full breadth of parasite evolution. The company is also building a proprietary tissue biobank to support its drug development pipeline.

Funding and Backing

Ditto Bio raised a $500K seed round and was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch. The company was founded by three scientists who worked together for more than three years at Arcadia Science, a $500 million biotech company, bringing deep expertise in computational biology, immunology, and genomics to their mission of turning evolutionary insights into transformative medicines.