Daven Tamayo

Medicines from mammoths? How 'Jurassic World Rebirth' science can help humanity, according to Colossal

Article (news)

johansson bailey

mosausaurus

David Dizon

ABS-CBN News

<div><span class="fr-video fr-deletable fr-fvc fr-dvb fr-draggable" contenteditable="false" draggable="true"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CM8dLyrUwh0?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe></span><br/></div><p>Imagine a world where once extinct species like woolly mammoths, flightless dodos and dire wolves can be seen not just in science books or museums but in biological preserves. Even better, what if reviving these species actually led to technological advancements that would help humanity?</p><p>The idea that an extinct species can be revived such as in the new movie &quot;Jurassic World: Rebirth&quot; is not too far from reality, at least according to Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company that is going all-in on the de-extinction of once very, very dead animals.</p><p>Speaking to ABS-CBN News, Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm and Chief Science Officer Beth Shapiro said their company does similar work to the fictional InGen/BioSyn/ParkerGenix companies in the Jurassic World films in that they are all in the business of gene-editing and cloning and all that superscience that leads to de-extinction.</p><p>“Colossal is working to bring back extinct species, rewild them, and also build technologies for conservation. I don&#x27;t think that in the Jurassic franchise that they had a conservation angle. But generally, the science is very, very similar to what they&#x27;re doing in Jurassic World as well as what we do,” Lamm said.</p><p>Shapiro said Colossal is working on species that are much more recently extinct than dinosaurs “because we haven&#x27;t been able to get any dinosaur DNA.”</p><p>“Not that we are constantly looking or funding expeditions for that. I mean, it would be cool, right?” Lamm said.</p><p>But first a background: Colossal Biosciences first grabbed headlines in 2021 when the company announced plans to <a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/spotlight/09/14/21/bioscience-firm-claims-will-bring-back-extinct-mammoth">resurrect the woolly mammoth</a>, an animal that came much, much later after the dinosaurs had died out.</p><p>Other animals on Colossal’s de-extinction pipeline were the dodo, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger and the northern white rhino.</p><p>In April 2025, Colossal made headlines anew when it announced that it had produced 3 genetically-modified dire wolf cubs: Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. The announcement drew immediate criticism, with some scientists saying it is impossible to modify the entire genomes of animals that have been extinct for thousands of years.</p><div><span class="fr-video fr-deletable fr-fvc fr-dvb fr-draggable" contenteditable="false" draggable="true"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f43QJ6QLLvw?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe></span><br/></div><p>Shapiro said that to create the dire wolf pups, Colossal first sequenced DNA from dire wolf remains, specifically two high-quality samples that wacs 13,000 years old and 72,000 years old, respectively.</p><p>“We used tools of ancient DNA to extract DNA from those bones, piece together the dire wolf genome, and then we used computers to identify what parts of the dire wolf genome were important to making dire wolves dire wolves. Then we took cells from living grey wolves and we used gene editing tools to gradually cut and paste our way from a grey wolf to a dire wolf. And then we cloned those cells and Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi were born,” she said.</p><p>Colossal currently has a 10-man team monitoring Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi in a 2,000-acre, secure, expansive ecological preserve, which has both an animal hospital and a storm shelter.</p><p>All three wolves are healthy, Lamm said, and are much larger than existing wolves. This tracks with fossil records that show dire wolves are 20-25 percent bigger and more muscular than grey wolves.</p><p>“Right now, Romulus and Remus are about nine months old. They&#x27;re about 100 pounds, so they are bigger than existing grey wolves, most existing grey wolves out there. They&#x27;re quite bigger. And then they also just got integrated with Khaleesi, their younger sister. And so, we&#x27;ve now integrated them into the pack. Khaleesi is still kind of more in that puppy phase, but the pack integration went really well, which we&#x27;re very, very excited about,” Lamm said.</p><p>Lamm said Colossal has been selective about which species they are working on by focusing on animals that serve an ecological purpose for their return “and that the technology that we develop on the path to their return can actually help conservation as a whole.”</p><div><strong>DE-EXTINCTION TO HELP HUMANITY? </strong></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:960px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/17516304143892025070412070_JWR_Johansson_Bailey (1).jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" alt="Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) extract DNA from a Quetzalcoatlus egg. Handout" style="width:960px"/><span class="fr-inner" style="text-align:left">Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) extract DNA from a Quetzalcoatlus egg. <em>Handout</em></span></span></span></div><p>In the new “Jurassic World: Rebirth” movie, one scene reveals the dinosaurs are slowly dying for failing to adapt to Earth’s current environment. Which beggars the question: will mammoths, dodos and dire wolves die out eventually because they can’t adapt to these modern climes?</p><p>According to Shapiro, one of Colossal’s criteria for choosing which species is up for de-extinction is whether the habitat exists for the animal to thrive today.</p><p>Dodos, for example, went extinct a couple of hundred years ago “because people introduced things like rats and cats and pigs that ate the dodo&#x27;s egg.”</p><p>“They didn&#x27;t fly, so they laid a single egg in a nest on the ground. And so, in order to bring them back, we have to identify places in Mauritius where those species have been removed. And fortunately, we&#x27;re working with partners at the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and Durell Conservation Organization who already have begun this work to try to help species that are alive today,” she said.</p><p>Aside from the cascading benefit of conservation, one of Colossal’s goals in the de-extinction journey is to advance disease treatment - a huge plot point in “Jurassic World: Rebirth” where ParkerGenix attempts to use Dino DNA to produce cardiac disease medicines.</p><p>Lamm said Colossal is developing tools that can help with genome engineering, which can help edit out disease states that are multigenic in nature. Another is computational biology, which can help researchers better understand things like cancer.</p><p>“There&#x27;s even certain things in species like elephants, like P53. Elephants get cancer a fraction of what they probably should based on, like, what we do or mice do based on age and body weight. And so, they have this overexpression of this protein P53, which basically makes anytime there&#x27;s a mutation makes that cell die or senesce, right?”</p><p>“And so, we study that because we&#x27;ve had to learn how to regulate it to actually make edits in some of the work that we&#x27;re doing on the mammoth, right? And so, maybe some of those technologies could be applied to cancer research as well,” he added. </p><p>Lamm and Shapiro may not be in the business of reviving dinosaurs but they do have their favorites in the new pack of dinosaurs in &quot;Jurassic World: Rebirth.&quot;</p><p>For Shapiro, she picks the titanosaurus - these giant, gentle sauropods with very long tails. </p><p>And for Lamm? &quot;I think that the safe answer as the CEO is I like sauropods.&quot;</p><div><em>Jurassic World Rebirth opens July 2 in Philippines cinemas nationwide from Universal Pictures</em></div><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/entertainment/showbiz/movies-series/2025/7/4/movie-review-jurassic-world-rebirth-struggles-to-rekindle-old-magic-0913">Movie review: ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’</a></div><div><span class="fr-video fr-deletable fr-fvc fr-dvb fr-draggable" contenteditable="false" draggable="true"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/goWTKnZSkJI?autoplay=1&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe></span><br/></div>

<p>Imagine a world where once extinct species like woolly mammoths, flightless dodos and dire wolves can be seen not just in science books but in biological preserves. And what if reviving these species actually led to technological advancements that would help humanity?</p>

Imagine a world where once extinct species like woolly mammoths, flightless dodos and dire wolves can be seen not just in science books but in biological preserves. And what if reviving these species actually led to technological advancements that would help humanity?