Colossal Biosciences Is Changing Definition of Conservation and Red Wolves Forever

There are sights and wonders to behold throughout the new offices and laboratories of Colossal Biosciences. As the Texas-based biotech firm that broke the internet twice this spring, first with the revelation that they created “woolly mice” and then a resurrected version of the dire wolf, Colossal proudly displays the footprints of both creatures in their new quarters. In one hallway, digital wolf prints are literally projected on the floor at some moments, and dodos or woolly mammoths the next. There is also a real-life woolly mouse with its mammoth-esque coat and that spiky, Super Saiyan silhouette, hopping around a spacious tank like the two-inch rock star it knows it is.

Elsewhere innovations via digital screens called “nano films” similarly allow visitors to peek in at scientists as they work to bring back various extinct species, including the aforementioned mammoth and New Zealand’s legendary 12-foot-tall great moa. Facts and figures will allow future school groups to get a general idea of what the folks in labcoats are doing, yet these “miracle workers” (to borrow a little John Hammond fairy dust) are blessed to not see the gawking tourists, which included myself and several other members of the press when we visited the Dallas headquarters last month.

There is plenty to admire, and more than a little showmanship to appreciate. Yet the element that most impressed these eyes is not just the sheer audacity of the tech company’s de-extinction ambitions (they hope to have a woolly mammoth calf in the next three years), but the quieter and arguably more revolutionary work the company is doing in animal conservation. On one wall in particular there rests an infographic of the more than half-dozen endangered species which Colossal’s technological research is being applied to at the moment. And what that information promises could be seismic if realized, potentially changing our conception of animal conservation in the 21st century.

Take for instance the African Savannah and Asian elephants, both of which have increasingly become affected by Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV), a hemorrhagic disease transmitted among young elephants, and which has an 80 percent fatality rate among Asian elephants. While less Instagram-friendly than a newborn dire wolf howling into the night for the first time in 10,000 years, Colossal announced a year ago that they helped develop an mRNA vaccine that successfully inoculated baby elephants from the virus.

“When I joined Colossal, there were three projects that I was really passionate about from my history of losing elephants in human care, and one of them was EEHV,” says Matt James, the chief animal officer at Colossal and a former director of animal care at zoos in Miami and Dallas. According to James, coming to the biogenetics company included him pushing for using this technology to combat the elephantine herpesvirus.

“We went and found [virologist Paul Ling], the smartest guy that we knew working in that space,” James notes, “and it took us 13 months from the moment we invested in the project to the moment when we had the first trial. That’s an incredible representation of the scale and pace at which Colossal can work, and that’s been one of the most meaningful projects for me because I personally lost elephants to EEHV.”

It also might be the first breakthrough in which the same technology that is coming under debate for bringing back the dire wolf (or at least a version of it) is used to even more radically change the fates of living species—albeit not without its own debate as well.

“We work with 60 conservation partners around the world, and we’re doing more conservation projects than de-extinction projects, but like no one seems to–I shouldn’t say care–but it’s never a focus,” Colossal CEO Ben Lamm muses. The entrepreneur is clearly proud of the impact the dire wolf news had on the world last April—the conference room we chat in is decorated with the mythic creature’s profile painted on walls like a gnarly ‘80s rock album cover—but he also appears bemused by how much less fanfare the same news cycle had for data that stated Colossal had cloned several American red wolves with ancient, seemingly long-lost biodiversity. (There are currently only an estimated 17 red wolves roaming free and on the verge of extinction in North Carolina.)

“What we’ve done so far is we’ve worked on the ghost wolf side,” James says, using a term applied to an admix hybrid of coyote and red wolves found along the Gulf Coast states. “We’ve cloned animals out of the ghost wolf population in Louisiana and Texas. What we’re doing now is once we have this historical analysis, we can understand what part of the ghost wolf genome is red wolf ancestry and which part is coyote ancestry, and then we can begin to use genomic editing tools to remove the coyote ancestry and replace it with historical red wolf ancestry.”

Yet even that aim has come under academic deliberation. While Colossal is partnered with several red wolf conservation groups, as well as Bridgett vonHoldt, a Princeton professor, geneticist, and lifelong advocate for preserving the red wolf,  other groups reacted to the new of Colossal cloning four red wolves with wary skepticism. One conservation group posted on Facebook, “… the samples cloned were NOT from Red Wolves, but were from Gulf Coast canids. The samples, acquired from canids in LA and TX, were analyzed and taxonomically classified as coyotes.”

While it is true that the “ghost wolves” that Colossal and vonHoldt are basing their research on are classified by the U.S. government as a coyotes, Lamm seems bullish about what their research and technology has discovered and will continue to reveal.

“The Red Wolf Conservation groups have essentially two variants of feedback,” Lamm notes. “You had half of them that were like ‘this is really exciting. This can help save the red wolves.’  Then you had half of them saying, ‘But this is not how we do things.’ That was something that we ran into. Because Fish and Wildlife classified one population of red wolves as red wolves—just because that’s how they classified it—that’s where people think that the road ends. But once again, animals don’t see these boundaries.”

In January 2026, vonHoldt and Colossal will publish a scientific paper which will drill down into the genetic data their research has unearthed in the ancestry of the “ghost wolves,” as well as that of the four red wolves Colossal made after studying those genomes.

“We said, ‘Okay why don’t we [drop] high level secrecy and go deep and do complete lineages on the four that we made, and on all the samples [vonHoldt] has from this other population,” Lamm says. “Spoiler alert: like half the populations are just as red wolf, and half the populations are more red wolf than the ‘defined red wolf.’ … Ultimately if you want to go back to the purity perspective of the genetics, the ones that we made are actually more red wolf than the current ones that are [considered red wolves].”

It’s a fine point, but one that hints at the full ramifications of what genetic editing might mean for protecting biodiversity and species with thin gene pools that are otherwise endangered by the impact of human activity.

“I think it definitely shakes things up, right?” says James. “I think if you spent your life thinking one way, it’s hard to shift to this new data set, but that’s how science evolves, that’s how conservation evolves. So as new data comes in, we have to react appropriately. Now we understand that there is this amazing genomic resource that can be used to rescue the world’s most endangered wolf population.” The Colossal Biosciences and Foundation executive furthermore suggests, “I would expect to see Colossal taking a much bigger role in the recovery of the American red wolf in 2026.”

The possible ramifications, and debate, about what constitutes a red wolf is just one facet of what genetic editing might mean for broader conservation efforts, which for Colossal alone also includes efforts to treat facial tumors hurting Tasmanian Devil populations in Tasmania, as well as an attempt to breed new Northern white rhinoceros males after they went extinct in the last decade (there remain only two female Northern white rhinos in the wild).

“I think there is this conception out there that conservation and de-extinction are separate things,” James says. “Conservation is in dire need of innovation. De-extinction represents the best opportunity for innovation and technology development in order to make meaningful change to conservation.” He later adds, “We’ve changed the economics of conservations to make it profitable to be invested in the preservation of nature.”

And in the mind of Lamm, the best possible legacy for the company he co-founded is both using its technology to bring back long lost wonders from the ancient past—they are, after all, working with a woolly mammoth sample that is 1.2 million years old—as well as developing open-sourced conservation technology that could inspire generations to come.

“We have 60 partners using our technologies,” Lamm points out, “but I’d love for that to be hundreds of organizations and thousands of people using our technologies and making a difference from a conservation perspective.” This extends in the next 10 years to creating “bio vaults” that allow governments to monitor the diversity of various at-risk species in real time within their borders, as well as building at scale artificial wombs that can “productionize” saving endangered species. However, there is still no denying that it is the wonder of seeing a dire wolf howl which makes possibly saving the red wolf from extinction seem a tangible reality.

“I don’t know if ever saving the northern white rhino or species like it will have the same impact as someone seeing a mammoth,” Lamm considers. “I do think that you have to have this sense of wonder on it. [But] if we are successful in all of the species that we’ve announced, and some that we haven’t, both in bringing them back and healthily putting them back into their environments, but we do nothing in conservation, I would consider that a fail. I think we get a 50 percent on the test. I think if we do all these things that we’re doing in conservation, but we don’t deliver on the inspirational promises we made on the de-extinction, even though it’s really good for the world, I still think we get a 50 percent. So I think we do have to achieve both.”

If they do, that would indeed be some real miracle work.