Evolutionary therapies for autoimmune disease
We're Adair Borges, Dennis Sun, and Emily Weiss, the founders of Ditto Bio.
We believe the world's best immunologists live inside of you.
TLDR; We transform parasite strategies for hacking the immune system into breakthrough drugs for autoimmune disease.
Viruses, ticks, and worms are the natural enemies of the human immune system. Over millions of years of experimentation, they've developed extraordinarily effective molecules to prevent your immune system from attacking them. This makes their proteins ideal drug candidates for autoimmune diseases, where a hyperactive immune system attacks the body's own tissues. We're mining the genomes of these organisms to translate these naturally occurring drugs into novel therapies.
https://youtu.be/4QFngdirw58
The Problem
90% of drugs fail in clinical trials, when they are tested in humans for the first time. These failures come after companies invest 3-5 years and $15-20M “derisking” drugs in cells and mice. Everyone knows that cells and mice aren’t people, but without a smarter strategy, billions of dollars will continue to be wasted making drugs that will never reach patients.
Our Approach
We start with molecules that already work in humans. Parasites have been running experiments on people for millions of years, creating powerful molecules to control the human immune system. Our AI platform identifies drug-like proteins from these organisms at scale, which we then engineer into safe, effective therapeutics.
The Best Drugs Come from Nature
Aspirin, penicillin, Botox, and GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Wegovy all originated as molecules from other organisms: aspirin from willow bark, penicillin from mold, and GLP-1 agonists from Gila monster venom. We're establishing parasites as the next transformative source of therapeutics.
Our Team
We’re three PhD scientists trained at top institutions (Harvard, Berkeley, UCSF, UCSD) with 40+ years of experience in computational biology, host-parasite interactions, and evolution. We worked together for 3 years as early scientists at another startup before founding Ditto.
Our Data Moat
Since founding seven months ago, we've analyzed 1M+ proteins across primate-infecting viruses, ticks, and parasitic worms. We've discovered thousands of proteins predicted to hit clinically validated human targets. Early experiments show that we have surfaced an untapped source of new drugs that act on high-value targets for immune diseases. Our proteins can achieve extremely tight binding (1–2 nM), among other drug-like properties.
We’re also building a tissue biobank that lets us map real-world immune memory to parasite proteins. This approach gives us a major advantage in tackling one of the biggest barriers facing all novel protein therapeutics: predicting and designing around immunogenicity.
The opportunity is vast: >98% of viral and parasite proteins remain uncharacterized. We're systematically mining this unexplored biology at scale to find and deploy nature’s best drugs.
Our Ask
If you’re an industry immunologist, biologics drug developer, or protein designer, please reach out at founders@dittobio.com to learn where our novel targets, natural scaffolds, and immunogenicity assays could make a difference for your drug programs.
