Colossal Biosciences, which bills itself as the world's first "de-extinction" company, has announced that is has reached a "momentous" milestone in its plans to revive the woolly mammoth.
Colossal is a start-up launched by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and renowned geneticist George Church that is aiming to resurrect the woolly mammoth—or, more accurately, to create a genetically-engineered Asian elephant that will be cold-resistant and have all the core biological traits of its extinct relative.
While not an exact replica, the hybrid animal will look like a woolly mammoth and be capable of inhabiting the same kind of ecosystems that the extinct animal once roamed, the company said. Colossal is also working on the de-extinction of the Tasmanian tiger (known to scientists as the thylacine) and the dodo.
Regarding the latest development, Colossal said its scientists have demonstrated the first documented successful protocol for generating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in elephants—a world first.
iPSCs can propagate indefinitely and, in principle, are capable of giving rise to any other type of cell in an organism's body. As suchm they are a key component of de-extinction projects.
"We knew when we set out on the woolly mammoth de-extinction project that it would be challenging but we've always had the best team on the planet focused on the task at hand," Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm said in a press release.
"This is a momentous step, with numerous applications, that we are proud to share with the scientific community. Each step brings us closer to our long term goals of bringing back this iconic species."
iPSCs were first derived from mouse cells in the mid-2000s, and shortly after for humans. They have also been demonstrated for several other animals, including cows, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, marmosets, dogs, rabbits, rhinos, naked mole rats and bats.
But for many animal species, such as elephants and whales, the ability to create iPSCs has remained elusive.
"In the past, a multitude of attempts to generate elephant iPSCs have not been fruitful. Elephants are a very special species and we have only just begun to scratch the surface of their fundamental biology," Eriona Hysolli, head of biological sciences at Colossal, explained in a press release.
"My early work in Dr. George Church's laboratory had been partially successful with iPSC-like cells that led to the foundation of the cells we have currently developed. And now using a multi-pronged approach to reprogramming we have the most successful efforts to date."
The latest research is published in a paper on the open access server bioRxiv and has yet to be peer-reviewed. But the company says a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal is "in progress".
"Our report is the first elephant iPSCs achieved and reported," Hysolli told Newsweek. "We had previous partial success in reprogramming elephant iPSCs before but the cells we have now are pluripotent stem cells."
"Why is this significant? Because iPSCs have been achieved for many species using more or less the same formula for reprogramming. But for elephants, those attempts failed or were insufficient."
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