Geneticist George Church obtains funding for laboratory woolly mammoths

Just over two years ago, serial technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm contacted renowned Harvard geneticist George Church. The two met in Boston, in the Church’s laboratory, and that fruitful conversation was the catalyst for the new Colossal company, which announced its existence on Monday.

The goal of the start-up is ambitious and a little crazy: it aims to create a new type of animal similar to the extinct woolly mammoth through the genetic engineering of Asian elephants in danger of withstanding the temperatures of the Arctic.

The project has been underway for years, but no one had ever given it enough funding to take it forward.

“We’ve had about $ 100,000 in the last 15 years, which is a lot less than any other project in my lab, but not for lack of enthusiasm,” Church told CNBC. “It’s by far the favorite story. We’ve never done any press releases in all these years. It just comes out naturally in the conversation.”

Church, a Robert Winthrop professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member at Harvard University’s Institute of Biological Engineering of Biological Inspiration, has a scientific history. He started the Personal Genome Project, created more than 20 companies and has more than 100 patents in his name.

Until now, the Church’s vision of reviving the woolly mammoth was “mostly dreaming and talking,” he said. “Ben came out of the blue, I think inspired from a distance by what I read about this so charismatic project, which was very underfunded.”

Colossal could take just six years to create a calf, Church told CNBC. The timeline is “aggressive,” he admitted. “When people asked me that question, I said,‘ I have no idea. We don’t have any funding. “But now I can’t dodge it. I’d say six aren’t out of the question.”

“Our goal is the success of the extinction of intercalable herds of mammoths that we can take advantage of for Arctic recovery. And then we want to take advantage of these technologies for what we are calling thoughtful and disruptive conservation,” Lamm said. . CNBC.

Proponents of the project say cooling the Arctic with woolly mammoths could slow global warming by slowing the melting of permafrost, where methane is currently trapped.

Lamm has founded and sold several emerging companies to companies such as LivePerson, Zynga and Accenture and, most recently, was the founder and CEO of artificial intelligence provider Hypergiant.

Colossal “is a for-profit company,” Lamm told CNBC, but there is likely to be no quick return for investors. “None of our investors are focused on making revenue right now, which is fantastic,” Lamm said.

Other participants in the initial $ 15 million round include Dr. Draper’s Dr. Dra Associates, Winklevoss Capital, and self-help guru Tony Robbins, among others.

Another investor and advisor, Richard Garriott, president of The Explorers Club and video game entrepreneur who spent $ 30 million to go into space as a tourist, told CNBC he was excited about future applications of synthetic biology , referring to the science of redesigning organisms for specific purposes, other than the woolly mammoth.

“Beyond the wonderful fact that ‘extinction’ becomes real, proving that technology with extinction is just the beginning. These same technologies will be able to solve a lot of human problems,” Garriott told CNBC. “Synthetic biology will allow us to create new ways of life that can deal with massive problems, from cleaning oil and plastic to carbon sequestration and more. The solution of tissue rejection and artificial uteri will help to improve and to prolong the lives of all humans “.

The woolly mammoth has been mostly extinct for 10,000 years, with the survival of the final populations until about 4,000 years ago.

Genetically, however, the mammoth is very similar to the Asian elephant.

“The Asian elephant is an endangered species. So we want to preserve it,” Church said.

“There are two main things that endanger it. One is the herpes virus. And the other is the proximity to humans. So we’d like to fix both of them and give them a new home, wherever there is. a lot of space with almost no humans, which is in northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. “

So Colossal aims to create a genetically modified Asian elephant with herpes virus resistance and the ability to withstand cold temperatures like ice.

The goal of creating the Colossal calf will look and behave like a woolly mammoth, Church explained.

It sounds like science fiction, but Church said he is confident he will be able to genetically modify the Asian elephant because he has done similar genetic manipulation with pigs, where he made 42 genetic modifications to his cells.

“We can then turn these cells into animals by transferring the nucleus, the part of the cell that contains DNA, into an egg and then it becomes piglets, in this case,” Church said. These genetically modified pigs are healthy enough to be used in organ transplants in preclinical trials at three hospitals in the country, he said.

“This is our proof of the concept that we can do that,” Church said. “We didn’t do it as a prelude to the elephant, we did it on its own, but it helps convince us why we got to the elephant.”

The genetically modified elephant would be implanted in an engineered endometrium at first and then grown in a bag, which would resemble the artificial uterus that Philadelphia scientists used to grow a genetically modified lamb in 2017, he said. Church.

Colossal hopes to work with a couple of Russian scientists to plant mammoths in the Pleistocene park, a nature reserve on the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. The idea is for mammoths to become part of a long-term plan to restore the tundra to its prehistoric state of grass instead of trees.

If these revived woolly mammoths ended up repopulating the Arctic, they would cut down small trees and help repopulate the grasses they thrive on, Church said. These herbs reflect sunlight better than the dark trunks of the conifers that live there. In addition, woolly mammoths bog down the snow, making it less insulating.

These herbs would cool the ecosystem, in turn reducing the release of trapped methane gas from the melting permafrost, one of the major contributors to global warming.

“If this methane is released, it’s 30 times worse than carbon dioxide per molecule” in terms of its ability to cause global warming, Church said.

“So that’s the idea, to add one more species to the nine they already have to help change it to what, at least from a human point of view, was a healthier ecosystem,” Church told CNBC.