Plans to bring some of the most iconic extinct animals back to life are becoming more and more concrete. And now it’s not just scientists who believe it: the world of finance has sensed the deal, pouring a river of money into the coffers of Colossal Biosciences, a company that works on the “de-extinction” of the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tigers and dodo (for starters), and which has just raised over 200 million dollars in investment and a valuation of more than 10 billion in the third round of financing (the last phase of capital raising in the world of startups).
Just two years ago, the valuation Colossal Biosciences received was much less impressive: almost a tenth of what it is today, about $1.5 billion. So what motivated this peak in credibility? According to the company itself, this would be progress already made in a very short period of time. “Investors – Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm told TechCrunch magazine – were impressed by the speed with which we created new technologies.”
Bringing extinct animals back to life
If the company’s goal, at least on paper, is the – very noble – one of bringing extinct species back to life to increase and restore biodiversity on our planet, the same probably cannot be said for its investors, who see the real economic value of the project in the technologies that will be developed for this purpose. And in fact, what Colossal Biosciences scientists are working on could have interesting implications in many fields.
The approach chosen to bring extinct species back to life involves mapping their DNA, which must then be compared with that of the closest relatives still alive, and then recreated using cutting-edge gene editing tools such as Crispr Cas9. At that point, it will be a matter of implanting the embryo thus obtained into a surrogate mother of the species who is still alive, and waiting for the end of the pregnancy to find out if the efforts have given the desired result.
All these steps require technologies that – at least according to Lamm – can have a revolutionary impact in the fields of health, fertility and the fight against pollution. So much so that the startup has already given rise to two spinoffs: Breaking, dedicated to the development of technologies for the degradation of plastic, and Form Bio, which will develop a platform for computational biology.
The return of the mammoths
The extinct species they are currently working on are the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger and the dodos. For the first two, work is at an advanced stage, and if everything goes as hoped, the first mammoth should be born by 2028 from a female Asian elephant. Although doubts, as is obvious, are not lacking. First of all on the likelihood that the de-extinct mammoth would have with the specimens that inhabited the Earth in the distant past: the reconstructed DNA will be inserted into cells taken from an Asian elephant, and it is almost impossible to establish how this influences the final result.
What to do with the revived mammoths, once brought back to life? The company initially plans to keep them safe in a reserve isolated from the world, with biosafety protocols. But over time, the project is to reintroduce them into their natural environment, the Arctic tundra, which however is increasingly smaller today due to global warming, and in which the mammoth has been missing for tens of thousands of years. It is therefore difficult to predict exactly how it will be able to acclimatise, and what changes (even harmful ones) it could end up producing.