The startup behind a Harvard geneticist's quest to revive the woolly mammoth just received a big boost. Colossal Biosciences, co-founded by Harvard's George Church, raised $200 million in Series C funding from TWG Global, the investment vehicle of Los Angeles Dodgers Chairman Mark Walter and billionaire Thomas Tull, reports the Houston Chronicle. The Dallas-based company, which has raised $435 million since its launch in September 2021, is now Texas' first "decacorn," valued at $10.2 billion. It aims to "de-extinct" the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and the Tasmanian tiger, also known as thylacine, per TechCrunch.
The funding is "truly game changing for us," co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm tells Quartz. Though Colossal has yet to generate any revenue, Lamm says "the investor base has been very impressed with the speed at which we've created new technologies," including artificial wombs, which could be used in fertility treatment, per TechCrunch. The funding also suggests "potential intersections between biotech innovation and athletic performance," Sports Illustrated reports, highlighting Walter's stakes in sports franchises, including the Los Angeles Lakers and England's Chelsea soccer club. Lamm said some of Colossal's technologies are also "world-changing" for human healthcare and agriculture.
As for resurrecting extinct beasts, the company says it has mapped the genome of the mammoth and the thylacine and is in the process of using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to edit the cells of the Asian elephant, the closest living relative to a mammoth, with plans to implant them into an egg cell. The embryo will then be implanted into an elephant, who will birth a living mammoth, or so is the hope. Its latest funding "gives the pre-revenue company more runway to sign contracts with governments that are seeking to protect or replenish their biodiversity, while also letting it expand its de-extinction efforts into more species," Axios reports. (More woolly mammoth stories.)
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