Meet the drug developer taking on wildlife diseases

Dr. Tim Cernak, a medicinal chemist at the University of Michigan, is pioneering a radical shift in drug development: creating targeted therapies for wildlife facing extinction from diseases like chytrid fungus in frogs and cancer in sea turtles. What started as a personal reckoning with planetary decline has become a mission to apply human pharmaceutical expertise to non-human patients—using the same tools that brought us GLP-1 weight-loss drugs from Gila monster saliva. His lab’s breakthroughs include curing a Gila monster named Pebbles of a deadly parasite with a repurposed antibiotic, and developing treatments for sea turtles with tumors that impair their ability to swim. Cernak argues that the same molecular principles used in human medicine—like targeting specific cancer pathways—can be adapted to animals, even when their physiology defies human norms. The real insight? Nature has already given us the blueprint for many of our most powerful medicines. Now, he says, it’s time to give back.