Polar bears, Florida panthers, red wolves and California condors are about to get a backup copy. So will a dragonfly most people could not pick out of a lineup. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based de-extinction company known for its work on the woolly mammoth, dodo and dire wolf, has partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to build a BioVault for species protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The project will collect living cells, reproductive tissue and genomic DNA from roughly 2,300 threatened and endangered animals and plants. Material will be cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at Colossal’s Dallas headquarters and other locations. Digitized reference genomes will be built for each species, and the genomic data is meant to go into open-access repositories “at no cost” to scientists, conservationists and wildlife managers.
“We’re not loading two of every animal onto a boat,” CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm told Reuters. He said the stored samples can support assisted reproduction, genetic management of wild populations and restoration if a species disappears entirely. “For the first time, we have the technology to make that possible at scale.”
A gap in funding
The United States protects 1,662 domestic and 638 foreign species under the 1973 law. The list has grown 300% since 1985, according to Gizmodo, and federal funding has not kept up, which has cut the resources available for each species roughly in half.
The new work runs through the Colossal Foundation, a nonprofit incorporated in late 2024 that has taken in $100 million in donations. Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, also serves as its executive director. “This initiative will redefine conservation in the United States,” James 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.” He called it “the conservation equivalent of building the national parks system for the genomic age.”
FWS director Brian Nesvik was more restrained. The collaboration, he said in a statement, “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.”
Svalbard comparison, and open questions
Colossal announced plans for ten BioVault facilities worldwide in February, as part of a reportedly nine-figure initiative with the United Arab Emirates, which invested at least $60 million in the firm. Lamm likened the plan to “a modern-day Noah’s Ark” and to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. “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,” he said.
Colossal has not said whether or how it might seek to make money from the vault’s archive of cryopreserved germlines and other genetic material. The firm has already commercialized some of its technology through spin-offs: Breaking, founded in 2024, which plans to engineer microbes that break down plastics, and Form Bio, founded in 2022, which licenses proprietary genetic analysis software.
The announcement lands as the Endangered Species Act is back in political dispute. The Trump administration has proposed changes that environmental groups say would weaken a law credited with keeping 99% of listed species from extinction. A federal court struck down several earlier rollbacks in March. The act has helped bring back the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, and the Florida manatee has improved enough to move from endangered to threatened.
Lamm called work like Colossal’s “one of the most important responsibilities of our generation.” In his words: “Every species is a library of evolutionary innovation millions of years in the making. Once lost, that knowledge disappears forever.”
Sources
- The Company Trying to Bring Back the Mammoth Just Teamed Up With the US Government
- Colossal Biosciences Is Building a DNA 'Noah's Ark' for Endangered Species
