Colossal Secures $200M, Advancing De-Extinction Science That Soon Could Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth

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Posted on 01/15/2025 7:25:38 AM PST by Red Badger

Colossal, a leading Texas-based biosciences company working to combat environmental dangers and revive extinct species, has reached a new funding milestone that it says will accelerate its pioneering de-extinction efforts and advancements in genetic engineering.

On Wednesday, the company announced it had secured $200 million in Series C funding led by TWG Global, bringing its valuation to $10.2 billion. Founded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist Dr. George Church, Colossal Biosciences has quickly become a leader in developing technologies that aim to reverse species extinction using cutting-edge CRISPR technology.

Since its launch in September 2021, the company has already achieved significant milestones in its ambitious de-extinction projects. These include plans to revive long-extinct prehistoric species like the woolly mammoth and more recent losses like the thylacine and the dodo. The company’s efforts also include broader applications in species preservation, environmental protection, and human healthcare.

TWG Global, a holding company with investments in technology, AI, and conservation, led the company’s latest round of funding. The recently secured funding increases the company’s total raised capital to $435 million.

According to CEO Ben Lamm, the capital infusion will support team growth, new technological developments, and an expanded list of species targeted for de-extinction.

“I think that we’ve done a really good job of recruiting the best talent in the world,” Lamm told The Debrief in an interview shortly before the company’s announcement. “We’ve established four labs and we work with 17 other academic labs around the world. And then we’ve hired 170 scientists.”

“So, when you look at the kind of network effect and infrastructure that we’ve built in a very short period of time, while also making progress on our three flagship projects—the mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo—it’s been pretty remarkable and game changing.”

“Every project is either on schedule or ahead of schedule,” Lamm said.

The first company to apply CRISPR technology to species restoration, Lamm describes Colossal’s mission as one that aims to “make extinction a thing of the past.” Its groundbreaking work includes creating genomic blueprints and advancing genetic engineering techniques that could revolutionize conservation and synthetic biology.

“I think that we are one of the most, if not the most advanced synthetic biology company on the planet,” Lamm told The Debrief. “And we’re definitely tackling some of the hardest problems.”

Colossal’s team includes over 170 scientists and 95 advisors in fields such as genomics, conservation, and paleontology. Partnerships with prestigious research labs in Boston, Dallas, Melbourne, and beyond support their efforts. Key advancements include mapping species genomes, engineering pluripotent stem cells, and developing tools for large-scale genome editing.

Lamm told The Debrief that the Colossal team has significantly advanced its capabilities in efficiently editing numerous points across the genome, which he says have reached an unprecedented scale in recent months, surpassing other players currently in the field. Lamm also expressed his hope that Colossal’s innovations would inspire more interest and growth in synthetic biology, potentially even enabling humanity to guide life and evolution in new directions.

With its flagship effort involving the woolly mammoth, Colossal has achieved several scientific breakthroughs toward restoring this enigmatic extinct species’ core traits. These include assembling high-quality genomes for mammoths and elephants, deriving pluripotent stem cells from Asian elephants, and fine-tuning gene-editing processes to replicate cold adaptation traits.

Similarly, the company’s thylacine project has led to the development of the species’ most complete genome to date, enabling precise genetic engineering.

“There’s a couple of big advantages to the thylacine work,” Lamm told The Debrief, though adding that the company’s efforts toward resurrecting the beloved marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, comes with its own hurdles.

“It’s a lot of edits,” Lamm said. “There’s 70 million years of genetic divergence between the fat-tailed dunnart and the rest of the dasyurids and the Thylacine. So that’s hard from an editing perspective, right?”

“But the better we are at AI, and the better we are at computational analysis, the less edits we have to make,” Lamm said. “People think it’s the opposite.”

“The better we are at the computational side and the analysis side, the less edits we have to make, because then we can really identify what really made a thylacine a thylacine—what really made a mammoth a mammoth, versus just making every edit that’s different.”

“We have a 17-person artificial womb team, and so what’s great about the thylacine project is while they do have a placenta that shows up at the end of gestation, it’s not truly needed, like it is like in a mouse, a pig, a human, or an elephant,” Lamm said. “You can get them through gestation without having to go through the full placental interface of attaching to a synthetic uterine wall like the inside of the uterus.”

“And so they’re a great candidate for us to test our early stage devices for artificial wombs,” Lamm added.

Speaking with The Debrief, Lamm said he felt it was likely that initial species births the company engineers, such as the thylacine or mammoth, are likely to rely on traditional surrogacy rather than ex utero methods. However, he emphasized the fact that the fat-tailed dunnart remains a promising candidate for fully ex utero development due to its short gestation period and minimal placental requirements.

Such groundbreaking advancements in marsupial reproductive technologies, which include inducing ovulation and culturing embryos in artificial uteri, could have Colossal on a path toward reviving the first thylacine within as little as the next few years.

“That could show results in a couple years based on where we are today,” Lamm told The Debrief. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the end of 2026, we don’t birth a Dunnart fully ex-utero.”

Meanwhile, Colossal’s avian genomics team has also made significant advancements, including high-coverage genomes for the dodo and its relatives. The team’s progress also incorporates successful gene editing in bird germ cells and the development of chimeric chicks as surrogates for future dodo restoration.

Naturally, the company’s de-extinction efforts have also become a target of criticism from some in the scientific community, particularly researchers who specialize in the study of the extinct species Colossal plans to resurrect. While speaking with The Debrief, Lamm emphasized that his company takes a proactive attitude toward criticism it receives, taking caution to recognize informed critiques as opportunities for growth.

Among the company’s early critics was Love Dalén, a Professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University who also served as a founding member of the Swedish Centre for Palaeogenetics.

“Dalén, who’s arguably the number one mammoth researcher in the world, was pretty negative on us,” Lamm remembers. “Fast forward to today—we get most of our mammoth genomes from him, [and] he’s one of our most active advisors.”

“His initial view was, ‘you’re using some mammoth genomes that have been published that are wrong, and they weren’t done correctly. They’re older genomes. There’s better technology. Let me give you some more,’” Lamm said. Since those early interactions, Dalén has become one of Colossal’s key scientific advisors, which Lamm attributes to the company’s willingness to engage, collaborate, and share knowledge with the research community.

Lamm also said this approach has strengthened the company’s scientific rigor overall and led to the development of conservation-focused initiatives, although he acknowledges that some critics remain unconvinced by Colossal’s achievements to date despite its active efforts to educate and collaborate.

Beyond its focus on de-extinction, Colossal’s technologies are also being deployed for species conservation. The company has donated $7.5 million to ancient DNA research and partnered with organizations like Re:wild, Save the Elephants, and BirdLife International to address the global biodiversity crisis.

“When we did our original investor presentations, scientists were predicting—not our scientists, but external scientists—that we could lose up to 15 percent of species between now and 2015.”

“That was in 2021. It’s now 50%,” Lamm said. “And so that’s not a good curve, right?”

Acknowledging this concerning trend, Colossal’s current environmental initiatives include biobanking efforts for currently endangered species, applying AI to track and analyze wildlife behavior, and even developing toxin resistance for vulnerable animal species.

One example Lamm offers is the northern quoll, a nocturnal marsupial native to Australia that enjoys feasting on invasive cane toads. Unfortunately, the natural toxins produced by cane toads are lethal to quolls, resulting in significant reductions in quoll populations in some regions of Australia.

“These quolls are critically endangered, and we’ve shown that single mutation change confers like a 5,000 times resistance to cane toads,” Lamm told The Debrief. “The quolls will go extinct before they evolve the natural abilities against the cane toad toxin.”

“We don’t have to change every single species, and we can’t eradicate every single cane toad because they populate so fast. But with one genetic change, using our technologies, we can make these super quolls that are cane toad resistant.”

Dr. George Church, co-founder of Colossal, summarized the company’s ambitions and emphasized the transformative potential of their work.

“We’re creating technologies that not only support de-extinction but also scale conservation biology to protect endangered species,” Church said on Wednesday.

Colossal’s advancements promise to address critical ecological challenges. As human activity accelerates the extinction rate among many animal species, the company’s genome engineering and species restoration tools could play a pivotal role in preserving biodiversity.

“The breakthroughs we’ve achieved are just the beginning,” said Dr. Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s Chief Science Officer, in a statement. “We are redefining what’s possible in conservation and restoration science.”

For Lamm, the company’s recent financial milestone will provide more than just crucial support for its existing efforts; it will also begin to pave the way toward Colossal’s next wave of de-extinction candidates, which he says will include avian and mammalian species.

“When we started, it felt very science fiction,” Lamm said. “I feel like de-extinction is significantly closer than people even imagine.”

“What felt even more like science fiction was artificial wombs. That’s not making a lot of progress. And so I feel like, in having to design the entire system for de-extinction as well as then go build the system for artificial wombs, those are two big, hard system models that you have to go pull together.”

Lamm says that Colossal is not only making progress but also doing so at an increasingly rapid pace.

“It’s moving at an incredible clip,” Lamm told The Debrief, while acknowledging the challenges his team has been confronted with. “I mean, this is really hard. It’s not like tomorrow we’re gonna have mammoths, or tomorrow we’re gonna have artificial wombs.”

Nonetheless, when asked where he thinks Colossal will be five years from now, Lamm told The Debrief that he expects the company will have established itself not only as innovators in de-extinction technologies, but will also likely have several success stories—likely to be historic ones for genetic science—under its belt.

“Where we will be in five years is, I hope we’ve had successful birth of numerous extinct species, and I hope that the technologies that we’ve developed on the path to de-extincting those species will have helped change the trajectory of critically endangered species,” Lamm said.

With ongoing support from its investors and the attainment of future funding milestones, Lamm also maintains his belief that Colossal will continue leveraging cutting-edge genetics and computational biology, all of which he says will ensure success at the company’s mission “to bring back lost species, and then apply those technologies to conservation.”

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

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1 posted on 01/15/2025 7:25:38 AM PST by Red Badger

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2 posted on 01/15/2025 7:25:59 AM PST by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)

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5 posted on 01/15/2025 7:28:52 AM PST by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)

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6 posted on 01/15/2025 7:29:42 AM PST by srmanuel

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