“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.”