OPINION
Our project is on track for the birth of a calf in four years’ time and could also help species on the brink of extinction
WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORDS “woolly mammoth,” what picture does it paint in your mind?
It’s an iconic, extinct mega fauna from the ice age so well-recognized and beloved by all of us, especially children; they see it in movies and documentaries, and in their schoolbooks.
Yet the woolly mammoth feels like a mythical creature. Sometimes, people put them in the same category as dinosaurs, even though they were separated by 65 million years. What is hard to fathom is mammoths were walking the Earth while humanity was building the pyramids. When you tell people that, it sounds crazy— even the pyramids have a mythical quality to them.
We were profoundly inspired by Colossal Biosciences’ co-founder, the geneticist George Church, and his pioneering vision: To resurrect the woolly mammoth from extinction using the technological advances now at our disposal. There was a lot of sequencing data from woolly mammoths appearing around a decade ago and George was a step ahead. He wanted to utilize this and build a technology company that could bring species back and restore ecosystems to mitigate the damage caused by humans—and so did we.
We could lose up to 50 percent of all biodiversity between now and 2050, so we are building technologies that could rewild extinct animals into ecosystems, propelling us toward the goals of conservation groups, and helping human longevity and health care along the way.
Helping Hand From Technology
What took this project from “is it possible” to “should we do it” was the advent of DNA editing and synthesis technologies; going from reading genomes [the entire genetic material of an organism] to writing them. And George’s lab has been heavily involved with large genome assemblies and multiplex engineering of genomes.
The acceleration of software in AI and different machine learning models has helped us. We built an entire software division at Colossal right out of the gate. Part of our model is to spin out technology companies. We have spun one out already called Form Bio and raised separate capital for that, just to help us with all the computational analysis of ancient genomes, assembly, comparative genomics and recommendation systems on what types of tools to use.
Now, we’re able to do multiplex gene editing of lots of parts of the genome at the same time. We’re also able to leverage increasingly bigger blocks of DNA.
Without all this software and AI, and the new discoveries in gene editing, our timelines for de-extinction would be many years longer. And from this innovation is a ripple effect to many other industries across animals, plants and humans.
