Not satisfied with aiming to revive the woolly mammoth and thylacine, Colossal Biosciences has now announced the third animal on its extermination list, the dodo. This follows a substantial new funding round, and the company also provides an update on its scientific progress to date.
First discovered by Dutch explorers on the then uninhabited island of Mauritius in 1598, the dodo became extinct less than a century later. The deadly combination of human hunting and exotic animals such as dogs and cats, combined with the dodo’s fear and lack of flight, made it one of the earliest clear case studies of human-induced extinction.
Being a symbol of obsolescence is a natural choice for Colossal’s lofty goals of extinction, even from the cynical point of view that the dodo draws the attention of both the public and investors. And sure enough, the company has now announced it has received $150 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised since its inception in 2021 to $225 million.
While less cynical, the dodo also makes sense as a target because it does to birds what mammoths do to mammals and thylacines to marsupials. The new funding will be used to launch Colossal’s new Avian Genomics Group. The group will not only focus on preventing the extinction of the dodo, but will apply lessons learned and techniques developed to support conservation efforts for endangered birds.
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“The dodo is a prime example of a species that has gone extinct because we humans have made it impossible for it to survive in its native habitat,” says paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro on the project. “As the first person to fully decipher the dodo genome, focusing on the genetic progress of ancient DNA throughout my career, I am working with Colossal and the people of Mauritius on the dodo’s extinction and eventual end. We are working on rewilding, and I am especially looking forward to facilitating genetic rescue tools that focus on birds and bird conservation.”
Colossal also provides an update on how the Mammoth and Thylacin teams are tracking. A mammoth team of more than 40 scientists and three laboratories has sequenced the reference genomes of African and Asian elephants and derived pluripotent stem cells from both. They refined the list of mammoth-specific genes targeted for editing and developed a technique that could generate more than 20 edits in these genes. Finally, they built a new embryology lab that could be used for endangered species.
Meanwhile, 30 scientists from the Thylacin team are working on a pipeline for how to extract pluripotent stem cells from dunnahts, the closest living relatives of extinct marsupials, and edit early cell lines of dunnahts. developed. Most impressively, the team created a prototype of an artificial womb designed to carry a marsupial offspring to term.
Whether or not we’ll ever see dodos, mammoths, or thylacines walking the earth again remains to be seen, but it’s an interesting idea that seems to be gaining more traction.
Source: Colossal via Businesswire
