Humans love to think of our species as unique. But on a genetic level, such uniqueness is surprisingly hard to find. And while that may be a blow to the ego, it also means that an evolutionary lens is one way to search for insights into human diseases. Animals are “adapted to use the same genes that you and I have, but in very different ways,” Ashley Zehnder told BioWorld. Zehnder is co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio Inc., which uses comparative genomics to identify gene networks that underlie disease resistance in different animal species.