Colossal Biosciences in Autumn 2026: Separating the Science From the Story

Few biotech companies manage to get a press release about pigeon embryos into mainstream news. Colossal Biosciences does it every few weeks. That makes the company both fascinating and difficult to evaluate. The news cycle mixes genuine technical progress with framing designed for headlines, and the two are rarely separated in the coverage. So let us separate them.

What happened in the last few weeks

• Artificial egg (early October). Colossal reported hatching healthy chicks from a fully artificial, shell-less egg system: a 3D-printed lattice with a silicone-based membrane that works at normal atmospheric oxygen. It is framed as an enabling technology for the South Island giant moa, whose eggs were roughly 80 times the volume of a chicken egg, so no living bird could serve as a surrogate. The announcement did not specify how many chicks hatched or at what stage the embryos were transferred.
• GenoMorph and the dodo (14 October). Colossal announced an AI platform, GenoMorph, that combines 3D skull morphology from more than 70 bird species with comparative genomics and developmental data to propose gene edits. For the dodo it has identified about 2,300 candidate edits related to cranial and facial shape. The company also reported a lipid-nanoparticle system to deliver editing tools into developing bird embryos, a Nicobar pigeon colony of 36 birds, and the derivation of pigeon germ-line cells. Peter Diamandis launched a fund, NeoGenesis Capital, to back startups building on Colossal's platform.
• Warhound (October). Colossal and Anduril launched a joint venture to breed military working dogs using genetic engineering, biobanking and cloning, with a reported $200 million seed round led by Sequoia.
• Funding. Axios reported in July that Colossal was in talks to raise at a valuation of at least $20 billion, up from $10.2 billion in January 2025, and that the company now has some revenue. No closed round has been announced.

Earlier in the year: a de-extinction plan for the bluebuck, an extinct African antelope (April), a biobanking partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (June), and a four-year, $4 million partnership between the Colossal Foundation and the IUCN Species Survival Commission (September).

What is legitimate

The enabling technologies are real, and they matter beyond de-extinction. Culturing germ-line cells of birds other than chickens has been notoriously difficult. Multiplex editing of large mammalian genomes, induced pluripotent stem cells from elephants, delivery systems into avian embryos, cloning capacity (Colossal acquired the cloning company Viagen in 2025): these are tools that conservation biology, agriculture and biomedical research can use. If the pigeon germ-cell work holds up under independent scrutiny, it is meaningful for endangered bird species regardless of whether a dodo ever hatches.

Shell-less embryo culture at normal oxygen would be a genuine improvement. Shell-less culture of bird embryos is not new; researchers have pursued it since the 1980s, but most systems needed oxygen enrichment and never scaled beyond the lab. A robust system at ambient oxygen that hatches healthy chicks would be useful for developmental biology and for any project that needs to observe or manipulate bird embryos. The word "would" matters: so far, there is a video and a press release, not a paper.

Conservation work with real partners. The EEHV elephant vaccine work with Houston Zoo and Baylor College of Medicine, the biobanking agreement with US Fish and Wildlife, and the IUCN partnership are concrete and involve partners with their own reputations at stake. The IUCN partnership is particularly notable given that the IUCN's own canid specialist group publicly criticised the dire wolf claims in 2025.

A functioning spinout machine. Form Bio, Breaking, and now Warhound show that Colossal's actual business model is a platform that generates technologies and companies. That is a legitimate and probably smart model. It is also why the valuation makes more sense as a bet on a platform than on mammoths.

What is hype

The word "de-extinction." Every Colossal animal is, and will be, an edited version of a living relative. Colossal's own chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, described the 2025 "dire wolves" as grey wolves with 20 edits, and no ancient dire wolf DNA was inserted. The IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group said they were "neither dire wolves nor proxies." A dodo built from a Nicobar pigeon will be a pigeon with dodo-like features. That may be a worthwhile goal, but it is not the return of an extinct species.

"2,300 targets" is a hypothesis list, not a result. An AI platform that proposes candidate edits is useful. But the number tells us how many hypotheses were generated, not how many are correct. Ben Lamm himself said that identifying a potential edit does not mean it will be introduced into an animal or that it is safe. The headline number is impressive precisely because it is not yet a measure of progress.

Press release first, peer review later. Colossal's pattern is to announce through media and video, with preprints sometimes following and peer-reviewed papers rarely keeping pace. The dire wolf genome analysis, for example, was an unreviewed preprint when the animals were presented to the world. For a company with dozens of PhD scientists, this is a choice, not a capacity problem.

Timelines. Colossal has publicly targeted late 2028 for its first mammoth calf. With an elephant pregnancy lasting around 22 months, that date is now close enough to check. The dodo has no stated hatching date. The thylacine was estimated at "as little as 8 years" in 2025. Long, flexible timelines are normal in hard science. Presenting them as near-term milestones is not.

The relationship with critics. In 2025, New Scientist reported that several scientists who had criticised Colossal were targeted by what looked like a coordinated online campaign, which the company denied, and that Colossal's lawyers had sent a letter to at least one critic. Whatever the details, a science company that responds to scientific criticism with legal letters damages its own credibility more than any critic could.

Where this leaves the company

Colossal is not Theranos. It produces animals, cells and data that others can examine, and its scientific leadership includes respected researchers. The question is not whether it is real. It is whether the story it tells is proportionate to the evidence it shows. Right now, the story runs well ahead.

The Warhound venture is a useful test case. Breeding healthier working dogs domestically, with better genetic screening, is a reasonable goal. Genetically engineering military animals raises animal welfare and ethical questions that a $200 million seed round does not answer. How Colossal handles those questions publicly will say more about the company than any de-extinction headline.

What life-science founders can learn from Colossal

Colossal is a masterclass in narrative. It turns platform technology that would bore most journalists into stories about mammoths and dodos, and that narrative has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Many founders I work with could learn from that: most life-science companies explain their technology far worse than they could.

But there is a second lesson. Narrative is an asset until it outruns the evidence. Then it becomes a liability: with scientists, with regulators, and eventually with investors who ask for the data behind the headline. The safest rule I know: never say anything in a press release that you would not defend in front of a sceptical reviewer in your field.

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If you are building a life-science company and want to tell your story in a way that is compelling and still holds up under scientific and investor scrutiny, I am happy to help you find that line. No theory for theory's sake.