Colossal Biosciences is editing genes and working on artificial wombs, its CEO has said
Texas-based Colossal Biosciences aims to bring back from extinction the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo bird, and has just raised another $200 million for the projects.
The startup is headed by AI entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who told Bloomberg that Colossal is on track to have a mammoth calf by 2028.
“We’re not going to do anything until we get the genomes right,” Lamm said in an interview with Bloomberg Technology on Wednesday.
The company is currently in the “editing phase” of the project, with the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, “actually ahead of schedule,” Lamm said.
A team of 17 is working on artificial wombs, the first of which ought to be ready within two years, he added.
Colossal has a market valuation of over $10 billion and has raised a total of $435 million in cash, including the most recent injection, $200 million from investor TWG Global.
TWG was impressed by Colossal’s “significant technology innovations and impact in advancing conservation,” the investor’s CEO Mark Walter said in a statement.
Lamm told Bloomberg that his project was inspired by forecasts that the earth would lose 15% of its biodiversity by 2050, which have since been updated to a 50% loss.
“It would be better to have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than to need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it,” he said.
Critics have pointed out the project’s similarities to Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale ‘Jurassic Park,’ which involved re-creating dinosaurs.
In December 2023, Russian billionaire Andrei Melnichenko said he was partnering with Colossal to develop a ‘Pleistocene Park.’ At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Melnichenko described it as a way to reduce methane emissions from Siberian permafrost by re-creating Ice Age fauna, as a “cost-effective method to mitigate climate change.” US sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict put the project on ice, however.
Lamm co-founded Colossal in 2021, with Harvard University geneticist George Church. Among the company’s backers is the CIA affiliate In-Q-Tel.
Scientists believe that the woolly mammoths suffered a population collapse around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last major Ice Age, with the last members of the species dying out around 4,000 years ago.
Colossal’s other two projects deal with more recent extinctions. The dodo, a flightless bird, disappeared in the late 1600s, after European explorers introduced invasive species to its native Mauritius, while the last known thylacine died in 1936 at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.
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