Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company, today announced that it has hatched live chicks from its fully artificial egg. It’s a first-of-its-kind incubation platform that supports complete avian embryo development outside a biological eggshell, from early embryo to hatch, without supplemental oxygen. The platform is a critical enabling technology for Colossal’s avian work, specifically the South Island Giant Moa de-extinction program. Colossal’s artificial egg represents a completely new generation of exogenous avian technologies that provides scalable solutions to overcome longstanding challenges in avian biology and biotechnology, and opens critically needed new pathways for conservation, said Ben Lamm, CEO of Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, in an interview with GamesBeat. In its lab setting, the artificial egg system itself is highly scalable and can just work in in a regular incubator. “That’s the magic of what we’ve developed. It’s an end-to-end system that’s been completely reengineered so that it can replicate what nature does with an egg and produce healthy, viable chicks. But at the same time, it also has been reengineered so that we can leverage it for all of our scientific needs,” Lamm said. Shell-less avian culture was first attempted in the 1980s, but prior systems required large volumes of pure oxygen, which cause DNA damage and impact long-term animal health and is an approach that is incompatible with standard commercial incubators while being impossible to scale for conservation or industrial applications. Colossal’s team solved this by designing and engineering a lattice shell architecture that incorporates a novel bioengineered silicone-based membrane that matches…
