“Just as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was created to preserve the genetic diversity of our food supply, this partnership aims to preserve the genetic diversity of life itself,” said Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences. The partner is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the target is more than 2,300 threatened and endangered plant and animal species.
Work will run through the Colossal Foundation, a nonprofit the company recently set up. Researchers will collect, sequence and preserve genetic material, storing cryopreserved DNA, tissues and reproductive cells in Colossal’s distributed BioVault network. A digitized “reference genome” will be built for every species.
Why now
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects 1,662 domestic and 638 foreign species. Gizmodo reports that additions to the list have risen 300% since 1985 and that federal funding has not matched the growth, so the resources available per species have been diluted by about half. The agency has a strong record with icons such as the bald eagle, the grizzly and the American alligator, but the caseload has outrun the budget.
FWS director Brian Nesvik, in a statement, treated the project as an addition to existing tools. It “will help advance our understanding of how biobanking and genomics can complement existing conservation tools and contribute to the recovery and long-term resilience of imperiled species,” he said.
Colossal’s pitch
Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer and now executive director of its foundation, made a larger claim. “This initiative will redefine conservation in the United States,” he said in the announcement. “For the first time, we’re creating a permanent genetic record of America’s most vulnerable species before they’re lost.”
The foundation has received $100 million in donations since it was incorporated in late 2024. All genomic data from the FWS partnership is to be released through “open-access repositories” and “provided at no cost,” available to federal wildlife managers, the scientific community and conservationists worldwide. James called it “the conservation equivalent of building the national parks system for the genomic age.”
Colossal first announced plans for ten BioVault facilities in February, part of a reportedly nine-figure initiative with the United Arab Emirates, which invested at least $60 million in the company. Lamm described the plan as “a modern-day Noah’s Ark.”
One thing remains undecided. Colossal has not said how it may or may not try to monetize the stored germlines and other genetic material. It has commercialized other technology through spin-offs: Breaking, founded in 2024, which plans to engineer microbes that biodegrade plastics, and Form Bio, founded in 2022, which licenses proprietary genetic analysis software.
Lamm called conservation work like this potentially “one of the most important responsibilities of our generation.”
