DALLAS — Colossal Biosciences announces that the company has successfully hatched multiple healthy, live chicks from fully artificial eggs. Colossal Biosciences notes that it is the world’s first de-extinction company, and it’s dedicated to restoring the Earth to a healthier state through technological and engineering breakthroughs in biosciences and genetics, according to the company’s website.
To complete the process of early embryo to hatch, Colossal uses an incubation platform that supports complete avian embryo development outside of regular eggshells without the need for auxiliary oxygen. This successful hatching is a breakthrough on the path to resurrecting extinct bird species and opens new possibilities for avian conservation and biotechnology, Colossal mentioned in a statement.
Previous attempts to hatch live chicks from artificial eggs required substantial amounts of pure oxygen that can cause damage to the bird DNA and doesn’t work with standard incubators. The team at Colossal overcame this problem by engineering a lattice shell architecture incorporating a novel bioengineered silicone-based membrane that matches the oxygen transfer capacity of a natural eggshell under normal atmospheric conditions, Colossal explained.
“It’s a really specialized very thin membrane that enables there to be really effective gas exchange, which is what the eggshell is unbelievably engineered for,” Andrew Pask, Colossal Biosciences chief biology officer, said.
Through this engineering process, the team at Colossal was able to create a device that works with standard commercial incubators and is easily manufacturable at scale.
“Every new scalable system for de-extinction is ultimately a biology problem wrapped in an engineering problem,” Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences CEO and co-founder, said. “At Colossal, we didn’t just replicate the egg; we re-engineered it from first principles to create something more scalable and controllable. This is what multidisciplinary science makes possible, bringing together biology, materials science, and engineering to solve one of nature’s most elegant systems.”
The incubation platform includes a clear window that allows for constant, real-time observation of the development process. According to Colossal, the hatched chicks now live at the Colossal Avian Preserve.
“The avian reproductive toolkit has lagged behind mammalian systems for decades because birds present unique developmental challenges. The artificial egg changes that,” Dr. Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, said. “For species where surrogacy is impossible and genome recovery has outpaced our ability to use it, this is the missing piece: a controlled, scalable environment for development that is not limited by the availability of the host.”
The Colossal artificial egg is joining a large portfolio of reproductive technologies that the company has developed across its de-extinction and conservation programs.
For more information about Colossal Biosciences, visit https://colossal.com.
