Colossal Biosciences announced Tuesday it developed a device that acts as a synthetic egg, which successfully hatched two dozen chicks. The company took fertilized eggs from their avian farm and transferred them to a lab, where they matured in synthetic eggs kept in a controlled incubator. After the chicks hatched, they were moved back to the farm.
The process has yet to be peer reviewed, but the company is pitching the technology as a step toward one of the company’s goals of resurrecting extinct dodo and moa birds. Using ex-vitro reproduction, rather than individual surrogates, could help it scale up production of endangered and de-extinct species faster.
The process could also serve as a model for human reproduction (which Colossal doesn’t currently do). “If pharma wants to use it, we’ll look at it, but it’s not on a direct monetization path,” CEO Ben Lamm told Semafor. Colossal has more than 100 artificial eggs, and said it would share the tech with interested conservationists and research labs.