'De-extinction' startup with $10 billion valuation revives dire wolf

Colossal Biosciences Inc., a Dallas-based biotech firm with a $10 billion valuation, has announced a new breakthrough in its audacious mission to resurrect extinct animals.

The company said on Monday it’s created three dire wolves, a species popularized by the fantasy series "Game of Thrones" but not seen on Earth in more than 12,000 years.

Privately held Colossal first gained fame in 2022 when it announced its goal to bring the woolly mammoth back to life — though it’s only so far managed to create a woolly mouse. The company has pitched its gene-editing technology as not just a way to bring back prehistoric wonders, but also develop lucrative applications in health and biodiversity.

Colossal said its latest development is the births of 80-pound brothers Remus and Romulus and the younger female Khaleesi (named for a popular character in "Games of Thrones"). The dire wolf pups live on a fenced-in nature preserve in a secret U.S. location and eat a mix of beef, deer and horse meat along with a specially-formulated kibble, the company said. The brothers are about 20 to 25 percent bigger than their closest living relative, a gray wolf, would be at their age, according to Colossal. It estimates they’ll weigh 140 pounds when fully grown.

“If we are successful in de-extinction, we’re building technologies that can help human health care and conservation,” Colossal Chief Executive Officer Ben Lamm said in an interview. “Just that piece of the larger system is worth billions of dollars.”

Colossal has raised $435 million from investors with eye-popping names such as "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson and IQT, a not-for-profit investment firm founded by the Central Intelligence Agency. It was valued at $10.2 billion in a January funding round from TWG Global, an investment vehicle run by Mark Walter, who also heads investment firm Guggenheim Partners, and billionaire financier Thomas Tull. The company has already spun off two startups: a plastic-waste degradation company that raised $10.5 million last year, and a computational-software venture that has garnered about $40 million to date.

The company’s focus on bringing back long-dead animals, which also include the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, has drawn skepticism from paleo-geneticists and the very idea has lent itself to ridicule and raised questions about the ethics of manipulating the natural world. This, however, has not put off backers. Winklevoss Capital Management, motivational speaker Tony Robbins and Paris Hilton, among others, are already getting returns in the form of equity from Colossal’s two spinoffs, Lamm said in an interview with Bloomberg News last year.

Investors in Colossal are willing to be patient to see a cash return. “The best way to make money is to have high impact, then you make money,” said Robert Nelsen, the co-founder of ARCH Venture Partners, who invested personally in Colossal because the company had progressed past the first rounds of funding where ARCH typically invests. He likened Colossal to ARCH-baked eGenesis, the biotech company that has transplanted genetically engineered pig kidneys into humans.

While eGenesis is targeted at a specific healthcare application and Colossal has broader goals, they’re both highly disruptive, Nelsen said. “The common element is that if you make a huge impact using new technology, you can disrupt exiting paradigms and that’s how you create value,” he said.

Colossal’s investor deck from its series B round last year focuses solely on de-extinction, not on applicability to human healthcare or other routes to monetization, according to documents the company shared with Bloomberg News. It describes de-extinction as the “process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species.”

Bringing dire wolves to life brought with it a series of challenges. Colossal contacted museums around the U.S. to find samples that contained the extinct animals’ precious DNA, eventually locating a 72,000-year-old skull in Idaho and a 13,000-year old tooth in Ohio, said Dr. Beth Shapiro, the company’s chief science officer. Shapiro and her team then ground up a small amount of each body part, sequenced the DNA and studied the results for clues on a dire wolf’s key traits, she said.

“Getting the genome was really hard, they didn’t live in cold climates so the DNA wasn’t as well preserved,” said Shapiro, who is also a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Shapiro said the team then took gray wolf cells and made 20 gene edits focused on dire wolf traits like large size, heavy muscles and a white coat. Those cells were then inserted into egg cells from domestic dogs and then implanted into the wombs of different dogs — large hound mixes — who served as the surrogates, she said.

Shapiro stressed that having specific animal de-extinction projects created hard goals and interim targets that are more likely to yield tangible results than general scientific research or broad biodiversity goals. The Colossal strategy is like a moonshot, she said, where a big goal focuses the effort. “Then you can actually do all the stuff along the path rather than just standing around going, ‘Where do I start?’ ” she said.

Colossal said it’s also cloned and birthed two litters of red wolves, the most endangered wolf in the world, using a new approach to non-invasive blood cloning. The four puppies are named named Hope, Blaze, Cinder and Ash.

When the first dire wolf puppy was delivered via c-section, Colossal Chief Animal Officer Matt James said he picked him up and rubbed him between two towels to coax out his first breath. “Good lord, this thing is huge,” James remembers.

Then the room got quiet, he said, recalling: “I can’t believe we’re holding the first dire wolf in 12,000 years.”