Closer than ever to cloning the woolly mammoth, claims Colossal Biosciences

Texas-based Colossal Biosciences claims it is one step closer to its goal of resurrecting woolly mammoths.

The company plans to use gene editing and cloning technologies to create Asian elephants with woolly mammoth traits. (Thomas Quine via Flickr)

Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences on Wednesday announced an early technical success in its effort to engineer elephants with woolly mammoth traits. The company said its scientists have managed to put elephant skin cells into an embryonic state.

“I think we’re certainly in the running for the world-record hardest iPS-cell establishment,” said Colossal co-founder George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachussets, to Nature. Church is a co-author of a prerint research paper on the work which will soon appear on bioRxiv.

As you can probably tell from the name, the woolly mammoth is a species of elephant that lived from about 2.6 million years ago till it went extinct a few thousand years ago. Colossal calls itself a “de-extinction” company and is working to bring back many extinct species back to life using genetics and cloning technologies.

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Researchers first showed that mouse skin cells can be reprogrammed to act like embryonic cells about eighteen years ago. These cells are called “induced pluripotent stem cells and can change into any different animal cell types. These pluripotent cells could hold the key to creating Asian elephants with the characteristics of woolly mammoths, like shaggy hair, extra fat and even massive tusks.

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But the company is still far from its goal of creating herds of woolly mammoths that can roam in the wild again but it is still a major step. “This is kind of like asking Neil Armstrong if he plans to go to Mars — kind of misses the point he just landed on the moon on Apollo 11,” said Church to NPR.

The company now has to use gene editing and other techniques to manipulate cells in order to create elephants that are similar to mammoths. According to Church, the objective is not to bring back the woolly mammoth perfectly because they want the new animal to have some traits that mammoths did not have when they roamed the Earth. “Like we want them to be resistant to the herpesvirus that is causing a huge fraction of infant elephants to die,” he added.

Colossal Biosciences is not without its critics. Many scientists have spoken out about the potential ethical conflicts the company could face. For example, their plan to create herds of woolly mammoths could end up with these animals marching off to their own deaths due to climate change.

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And there are some arguing that the company’s technology could prove quite dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm told Entrepreuner in 2021 that “as long as we’re transparent, people can hold us accountable,” when asked about negative consequences or bad actors having access to the tech.