Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - How AI Is Bringing Extinct Animals Back (And What Comes Next) | Ben Lamm (Colossal) | EP #245

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

This episode was filmed at the 2026 Abundance360 Summit. Learn more at https://www.abundance360.com/  This interview explores the groundbreaking work of Colossal in synthetic biology, de-extinction, and AI integration. Colossal CEO Ben Lamm explains how the company is revolutionizing biodiversity preservation, tackling plastic pollution, and creating living products with immense potential. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Ben Lamm is Co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding      Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter  _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with Ben X Instagram Linkedin Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on March 10th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea of bringing back the Willie Mammoth had been around for a long time. You jump in, take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that. I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was just really interesting. So Colossil is a parent company, is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential. Our first biological products company spun out, which was breaking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can, you know, break the chemical. bonds of plastic. I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. Without AI,

we would not be able to do anything that we're doing. What Ben is building inside of Colossil, being able to design using AI and then build living products. Our vision is... How do you like having Elon as your warm-up act? Yeah, that's the greatest thing ever. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. So, and he loves Bully Mammas. And he does. He does. And he wants Jurassic Park. He's not alone. I won't. I'm not saying that's for me. I'm just saying that he's not alone.

I understand that. It's the number one request we get. Yes. And then megalodons is two, which is also really weird. Well, megalons are just cool. I mean, they littered their teeth all over the ocean floor. They're still scary. That's scary.

I'm scared enough of the ocean without it. Jaws times 100. So as we're going along here, please use your Slydo app to add questions. So I want... First of all, I've known you now since pretty much the beginning of colossal. Yeah, you were like first text. Yeah. First, second text, yeah.

And I am such a fan of you as a CEO, first and foremost, and then second, the company. The idea of bringing back the Willie Mammoth had been around for a long time. It had been played around in nonprofits and so forth. I'm going to summarize. This man meets George Church, one of the greatest, you know, synthetic biologists, Chris Berr, Gene Editor, Entrepreneur, Professor at Harvard Medical School. And you ask him, what's your favorite pet project? Yeah, I asked if he had one project, if he could work on one project for the rest of time,

with unlimited capital, what would it be? And he didn't hesitate. Like, it wasn't like, let me think about it, let me get back to you. And it was just instantly, he's like, I'd work to bring back mammoths. I'd rewiled them back into the ecosystems, and I'd build technologies that could reapplied to saving species and also human health care. He just didn't hesitate. So you jump in.

You take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that. I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was just really interesting. You build a company which goes from zero to $10 billion valuation in four years. It's massively undervalued. I totally agree with you. Yeah.

I love you. And it's just it's you as the CEO who has done this. you've built an extraordinary team. How big is it? Thank you so much, Phil. How big is the team now? We have 260 scientists, 200 here in the U.S. and 60 in Australia. And a significant number of AI programmers.

Yeah, exactly. You've become an AI company. Yeah, yeah. I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. So we feel like the synthetic biology part of our work is really interesting. So we don't always lead with AI, but AI without AI, we would not be able to do. Anything that we're doing. I want you to think about this.

What Ben is building inside of Colossil is a platform and an engine for creating living products, being able to design using AI and then build living products. Let's talk about the work you're doing in Deextinction. Yeah, so we thought that if we were going to go build this into end pipeline for synthetic biology, and we would have to develop technologies across computational biology, cellular engineering, genetic engineering, cloning, somatic cellular transfer, and others, eventually artificial wombs. And we thought that if we're going to do that and build this end-to-end platform,

what's the best way to do it? And we thought, well, if you start with de-extinction, right, because we are facing a massive extinction crisis right now, and if we do that, we were going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in biology, Genotype to phenotype relationships, ancestral state reconstructions, comparative genomics. So there's so many things that we have to solve. And in that, that allows us to build a system model

that can be applied to all types of solutions for biological products. You know, our first biological products company spun out, which was breaking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can, you know, break the chemical bonds of plastics. So Colossil is a parent company,

is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential. We'll talk about a couple of them here. A couple of them are super top secret. We can't discuss, but they're as big or bigger. So breaking is one. So you guys all know the microplastic issue, right, that we have like five grams of plastic in our brain, the size of a plastic teaspoon or credit card. And most of that, 90% is absorbed through your gut. Some of it comes through your skin and such. But what breaking has done is what? Yeah, we was actually, we originally thought, the original thought was that they had discovered an enzyme from a microbe.

But after a further analysis, we took this discovery at the VSA Institute, put it in colossal, started to really understand it. And actually, it's a concert of microbes working together, which we were able, which was actually even better for us, because we were able to essentially understand the enzymes that are being made. we're also understanding the ability to edit each one of the microbes to make different variants of the enzymes to hit different types of plastics. And, you know, the plastic crisis that we're in is terrible, not only for human health care, but the oceans and many parts of the environment and others that it's now affecting. But what's interesting is that most plastic treatment and degradation companies are just making smaller plastics.

They're just making smaller microplastics, and that's not solving the problem in any capacity, right? And so for us, you know, if we just made a company that made smaller plastics, we didn't think that's the right thing. And if we just found, designed a company that could, where the chemical process to pre-treat the plastic is worse than the plastic, that was also a bad thing. And so what's interesting about this discovery is it actually breaks the chemical bonds of the plastic. And so we were able to use directed evolution and supercharge it using our pipeline and some of our editing tools so that not only does it have a larger breadth of plastics that can break down, But it also breaks them down at a much faster rate per surface area. And we are starting to look at the human body. So I find this fascinating.

Imagine a supplement you could take that actually breaks down the bonds of the microplastics in your gut before it gets absorbed. Yeah. Because the plastic problem is a global problem. Yeah. And it's not just a problem in the environment. And it's in our food supply. It's in our reproductive tissues across the blood brain barrier in some cases.

So it is a pretty big existential problem that we have to solve. And so you're not going to have, like, you know, one solution to rule them all. You've got to have a myriad of different solutions. And that's really the goal of breaking is how do we break down and get rid of plastics, you know, in the world. So when you're, how many species are you working on bringing back? So publicly, we've announced the woolly mammoth, the Tasman tiger, the Dodo, and the Moa. And then we've made the dire wild. wolves. We will have more dire wolves coming, which we have announced. By the way, I'm just going to,

let's get the images in the back over here. Here's the Willie Mout and mice. How cute they are. Yeah, they are, they are objectively the cutest mice on the plane. And the woolly mammoth. Yep. Those are a good, yeah. And the, the dire wolf. Yeah. So that's Rymalous in the front, and Remus in the back. And that's George R. Martin. which is great. So we did, that was actually one of the fun, like, there's a lot of cool stuff that we get to work on. But one of the cool things is that, like, you know, I think kids of all ages, like, whether you're, like, you know, three or you're older, George R. Martin, we did a Zoom with him. And I, and I, and I, we got introduced to him. And obviously, if you don't know, George R. Martin, he, he created, wrote a song of ice and fire, and he did, which became Game of Thrones, which popularized, uh, Dyerwolves. Most people thought Dyer were just mythical creatures, including some members of the Game of Thrones cast, which I won't call

them out. But they did. And what was interesting, though, is, you know, when we, you know, I got introduced to George and we put him on Zoom and I just, let me just show you something. I showed him to him. And he just teared up. He's like, this is like, he knew exactly what it was, right? He knew it wasn't a mythical creature. So it was a pretty cool thing to show that we could take a 73,000-year-old skull and make puppies. And we did it in 18 months, which is pretty remarkable. It's extraordinary. So the de-extinction business, people don't, you know, I didn't think of it as a massive

revenue opportunity when I began. What's the business case in this? And how big, I mean, EY did an estimate of the size of the market for you. Can you say? Yeah, they said through educational content and changing STEM-related content and education as well as looking at the kind of ancillary effects, and they look at like where people are, if you could take dollars, and these would be net new dollars, so they wouldn't be taking away from anything, but you take net new dollars that are comparable to things that are

extinct, but layer on education, the world spends about 12.5% of global consumers buy something that's extinct every year. And so it turns out to be like $1.7 trillion. So, which is really interesting. And so part of our model and part of our thought process is on the de-extinction work is not only to subsidize the platform, but to help countries do it, which is pretty interesting. And we're helping them preserve their species, which actually is a quite lucrative business model, as well as helping from an educational perspective. And so far, the feedback's been phenomenal. So just to land that plane, you just came back a month ago from Dubai. and announced a few major deals there.

Can you say what those were? Yeah, so we announced the world's first bio-vault. There's not the equivalent of the bio-vault for animals as there are for plants, right? You've got a lot of fragmentation. You've got incredible people and nonprofits and zoos and others working on bio-banking, meaning they're saving individual little pieces of cells and whatnot. But, you know, when I naively started this business,

I came from software, so I thought, oh, we'll just plug into the GCP of species, which doesn't exist. So we had to go, we had to go build reference genomes for every single species that we work on. And then we said this should be more of a global project. Individual countries should have stakeholdership from it. So we partnered with the UAE is our first partner. There's incredibly diverse fauna in the region that is, much of which is going extinct. So we need to protect it. And then we also need to sequence it and build digital backups and also ensure that that's shared with the global scientific community and that should be subsidized by governments, right? And they should take, I think we did a lot of over about a year, we did a good

job educating them on the importance of biodiversity, why you need to protect diversity, why it's so important for national pride as well as tech, as well as the impacts from the data from from these animals. And so, so if you don't like, you should do it because you like ecosystems. If you don't like ecosystems, you should do it because you like animals. If you don't like animals, you should do it because the applications could be helpful to humans. And if you don't like humans, then you're probably not the right fit for us talk to. But fundamentally, we got them to say, agree to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the world's first biovald. And instead of also doing it in, you know, some secret backroom, you know, cave or underground thing.

And there's still redundancy models around that. But do it like in a high trafficked area. if you're going to spend X dollars, spend X plus Y, and wrap educational content around it, you know, make it available for kids and whatnot, which they did, which they agreed to, which is great. And then from that, we're building a living lab. And so it's a nine-figure initiative for us. It's a nine-figure initiative for the country.

And, you know, I think, you know, it also builds capabilities in country for countries to also protect their biodiversity in a complete new way, while also sharing globally. the data. Yeah. So the way I think about this is countries are your customer for saving their endangered species. And eventually it'll be productionized.

Once we are successful with artificial wounds, you're just puzzling. So the other thing that they're doing besides breaking is they're giving birth, excuse the pun, to an artificial womb company. So that these mammals and these birds can actually give birth

ex utero. Right? So imagine a future in which, and speak about it, you have three of these projects going on. Yeah, so we have three, they don't work yet, but we have three, we have three many moonshots within our big moonshot, right?

Yeah. Of artificial wombs for different animal clades. And, you know, our vision is using biobanking, using synthetic biology, using automation and robotic process automation with assistance from AI and computer vision and artificial wombs, we could production-eye species development. And so when you have small,

and we have genetic bottleneck around a certain species, or you have long gestations, like with the northern, everyone knows about the northern white rhino, right? A lot of people at least know about it. There's two females left. They're functionally extinct. There's low diversity in them. There's a bottleneck because they're related,

and their 18 embryos are related. But if you can engineer in genetic diversity from that, both synthetically and from lost specimens, and then productionize it through artificial wounds, the $25 million that people are spending a year keeping two animals alive, you could use a piece of that to productionize it, and then the rest of that could go to water education

and other things for the country, right? And so I really do think that productionizing endangered species and also helping species adapt at the same curve of which we are changing environments is also something that's going to be needed in the future because evolution is not fast unless it's directed. You also purchased the world's top two clothing companies. I love that.

You forget that. It just happened to buy it. I know, I know. So most people think of cloning and they're like, I think I've read something about a celebrity cloning their dog, right? And we did clone Tom Brady's dog, so I think we're part of that. Tom Brady is an investor. So he did.

We do kind of like push that narrative to people because it's true. So I guess we're part of the problem of when people think about it. But what's interesting is that only like 18 species have ever been cloned. And 15 of those have been cloned by the company Viagin that we, the main one that we bought, we bought another one. And most cloning efficiencies, and I think this is really important. Most cloning efficiencies is only about 2%. And Viagens was at 78% pretty consistently, which is amazing, right?

And so the only endangered species that have ever been cloned on the planet were cloned by Viagin, right? And so things like the blackfooted ferret and others that, you know, are going extinct, Viagin took old cells and were able to reanimate them and then clone them. And so I think that, you know, for, we, people still love their dogs. And nothing negative about dog cloning. People I get asked if I would clone my dogs, they're mutts, so I'd probably save more. But I don't know, maybe I'd clone them because I love them. but so we're not taking away the cloning business for consumers.

So people love that business. It's a profitable business. We're still supporting that business. But then separately, we're now taking those technologies into country and helping not just productionize with artificial wounds, but productionized cloning of critically endangered species. We have some big announcements to share with the local government on it. Okay. So I want you to think about the,

pipeline, the platform that colossal is, is being able to use AI and synthetic biology to say we want this phenotype, these genes, these gene copies. You know, I was in a conversation with one of your scientists saying, yes, we're going to a Tusk conference, right? I was like, what? And being able to understand, okay, we want the snout to be longer, we want the teeth to be longer, and being able to use AI to change which genes, which enhancer sequence. and be able to design the living animal that you want, which is why I said, you know, someone asked you, could you create Pikachu?

And you said, yeah, we could probably create Pikachu. Yeah, I did get asked. I got asked that is like the first question on at South by Southwest a few years. And then the rest of the entire panel was about Pokemon. Which I was really hopeful to talk about, like our vaccine development for elephants and others. But it was mostly about Pokemon. Oh, God. But what I find fascinating is if you can engineer life that way, the missions that the companies that are being built and spun out include a company that can create disease resistant plants or drought resistant plants.

Plants and animals are something that we're disease resistant animals. We're spending a lot of time on it because, you know, leading extinction rates are not just human cause, but some of them are supercharged by humans, but they're existing in nature like disease. And we get this, you know, a project that I'm very passionate about that we're working on is Kittred. And most people have never heard of Kittred. It's the leading extinction driver right now on the planet in frogs and amphibians. And they're not fluffy so they don't get as much attention. But, but it's terrible for ecosystems, but it's something that we can solve with genetic engineering, right?

And so for us, you know, and not only can we solve the current problem, but we can also create chitry frogs and salamanders and others and amphibians that are chitred resistance which have huge applications same thing you know we're not currently working on corals after dinosaurs it's like dinosaurs corals and then i guess Pokemon uh dinosaurs corals dragons Pokemon everyone's really excited about dragons and um and so uh we aren't working on dragons and we're not working on Pokemon yeah or corals yet um and so yeah we get a lot of requests um but but the coral side is really fascinating and it applies directly to this idea of animals and plants. So we have an entire group now that's focusing on how do you apply some of the,

like what are some of the biggest issues from livestock to, you know, critically endangered species, what are commonalities around these vaccines? What are commonalities around what can be developed to infer resistance, right? And, you know, part of it's also amazing because, you know, most people think about colossal, they only think about the mammoth, they only think about the extinction, they don't think about the platform like you've talked about, which I'm really appreciative that someone's talking about the larger synthetic platform and system that we're building. But then also people don't really think about kind of like what the ripples effects on society are.

And we don't want to live in a non-biodiverse ecosystem and an environment. We don't want to live in a world where we are changing it faster than nature can catch up. And I think that synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, will be, you know, and I'm sure others in other industries will to agree with this, but I believe it will be the most transformative technology we, as humanity ever has. Yeah, you know, you think of AI as a multi, multi-trillion dollar, 100 trillion dollar market. That's why I think we're massively undervalue. Yeah, synthetic biology enabled by power by AI is as big a diverse market. I mean, how big is the market for, you know, engineering disease resistant plants and drought

resistant plants and animals. Yeah, I mean, it's hundreds of billions today, and it's just not well-tracked, right? But if you look at everything that can be applied and what the current rate is, you have a terrible, like a swine flu or a bird flu or whatnot that wipes out of population, you've got so many precautions that also go into these, right? When we brought back to Dyerwolves, we got some feedback that are like, oh, people don't like wolves because they're going to go kill the cattle. It's like the way we raise cattle, the wolves aren't going near it. Like, it's gross. And so it just is. It just actually is. And so it's just gross. And so what's interesting, though, is if I think that we with certain, we do that because of how we've had imbreeding and

hybridization and all this over time, I think that if we're smarter about this, and we also have the opportunity to educate governments on things like GMOs, right? Because for a while, there this anti-GMO genetically modified or it is a movement, right? Because people thought, oh, it's going to change your genome, and then you're going to, if you eat GMO corn, you're going to, like, I don't know what they thought. I mean, I had this conversation with Rob Sake on Zoom earlier today that, you know, GMOs have saved so many lives.

They've taken nobody. But it's an educational moment, right? It's like, like, you know, there was a season when seatbelts were scary for people. There was literally a time where, like, no, we can't put seatbelts in cars because it's going to make people think cars just bad or that cars are dangerous. Like, well, cars are dangerous, right? And so it's an opportunity to educate, right? And so we get that. And if you go look at, like, you know, when we were meeting with the Australian government about reintroducing the Tasmania tiger, because all the

species that were working on, we want to reintroduce, you know, their law, technically that Tasmanian tigers are GMOs. And so they are genetically modified organisms, right? Even if they're 100% genetically identical, they're an amalgamation of 53 different Tasmanian tigers, over the course about 300 years. And so what's interesting about that is they're still GMOs. And so for us, we had to then educate the Australian government. You can't just have an anti-GMO narrative as it relates to the Tasmanian Tiger, because then you can't rewile this incredible species back into your country

because you see it as what you're afraid of in the 80s. There's another, dare I say, multi-trillion dollar market work. on gene drives oh yeah once again gene drives is a 40% technology problem 60% marketing problem yeah can you describe what it is yeah who's a customer is and how big it is so so the invasive species problem it's global problem it's about 5.4 trillion dollars it's currently measured I think it's much larger than that because I don't think it's it's hard to truly quantify but as the world gets smaller from a commerce perspective, invasive species are just more prevalent, right? And that's everything from what we're seeing, you know, in Australia with the cane toad,

cats, even carps in Australia, like invasive carp, and that sounds weird. I don't know who put them there, but they shouldn't be there. And then people will talk about mosquitoes, but what we're seeing right now in the U.S., and a big problem coming to U.S., Texas has just declared it as a national emergency, is the screw worm. It's coming up through Honduras and Mexico. It's now in southern Texas, it is going to decimate our cattle in bison industry. And so how do you combat that, right? And so the best way to combat that was you kind of have a couple choices. You can create vaccines and try to do different things to the animals themselves, but then that goes directly into USDA, and you've got to work through that, and there's some anti-GMO movement still that persists

from an education perspective. But then separately, an idea that you could create, genetically modified screw worms and release them so that as the next generation are produced, they're all male. And so you, over time, know how much they love each other. They're not going to make more. They don't have the same technologies that humanity has and disposable and opposable thumbs. So they're going to go. They die out. They're going to die out, right? And so there's people, this is terrible, but this is true. In New Zealand, in Australia, in parts of Africa, People are killing animals because they're invasive species. They're killing cats.

They're killing possums. They're killing these species because they're decimating their local population of small marsupials in Australia or like birds in New Zealand. And, you know, that's an animal welfare nightmare. That's a, that's a, you know, social nightmare. Like, who wants to be, you know, because people care more about cats than screw worms. And so if you, but if you engineer the right gene drives into them and create the right biocontrol around, them, you can have animals, including insects, live out their normal lives, and then over time, you have a decrease in that population humanely. And so, you know, people release gene drives

in Africa around mosquitoes and everyone freaked out, and then they stopped it because they thought, you know, oh, no, it's bad. But mosquitoes are a part of the food web. I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to stop it because they were part of the food web. But we know invasive species are not a part of the food web because this is a word invasive. And so, yeah, so it's a huge problem. We're working with our government, and we're working with international governments on it. But that's the magic of AI combined with synthetic biology.

Two years ago, if you said, should you be working on biocontrol and biocontainment and gene drives, I would have said, well, it didn't really work with, I didn't really get into it, because I would have thought it didn't really work. when it was distributed around mosquitoes. But now it's a $5 trillion problem, right? And there's not, we have an interesting model to it

and some proprietary technologies that makes it safer than what has ever been dispersed in the wild. And also we have the ability to roll it back, which is helpful. How big is that marketplace? How big is the spend on going after invasive species? U.S. is over 500 billion here. So in the in the in the economic impact the spin in just just domestically just but I don't know off the top of my head what the spend against it is because the way that it's mostly combated even is with everything from poisons like literally poisons like they literally poison the environment as a way to get rid of the invasiccies like you know it's it's like archaic ways of treating cancer right and versus what we know is here and what is coming.

It's the same thing is what people are doing with the environment. So poison is one, and then for specifically larger animals, they're killing them, poisoning them, trapping them, and it's pretty non-humane. Yeah. I just want you understand how huge this opportunity is. You know, dozens of deserts of species to be attacked and cost dozens. And none of the people are focusing. I mean, the good news is compute, power, AI.

anthropomorphic robots and others people are really focusing on, which is great. I still think, like, if you go ask, like, 90% of people that are fluent in synthetic biology and think about genome engineering, I'd say 99% of them will focus only on human health care, which is great, right? But I'd say that's 99%. But the same technologies apply to other use cases, I think, are even larger economically, but also have a bigger opportunity to help us. you're focused on creating healthier embryos, reinventing IVF, advanced gene editing technologies.

I mean, these are all sort of spinouts that are coming out from this engine that you've created. Yeah. So our artificial wounds don't work yet. Just full disclosure. And we have three projects around that. But what we found is that, like, you know, as you break some of these problems down from a first principles perspective, and you look at kind of like, how would you rethink it, how would you start? And what's interesting is, like, we are keeping, like, you know, I've got kids now, and they're great.

And we went through the IVF process. And, you know, it's weird and crazy and it's archaic and it's emotional. And then, like, this thing that's so precious, you, like, look at it from, like, this archaic, like, grading scale, right? Like, this morphological grading scale. And it's like, that's how we're true. using these things. It's crazy, right? I think it's great. I think it's very archaic versus where technology currently is. And so what's interesting is, like, for us to be successful even long term with our mammalian-based artificial wombs is about nine different, there's four core,

but nine different core placental types. We have to innovate in a couple of different categories. And one of those is just keeping embryos healthier longer, right? And if you look at, like, how current modern-day IVF clinics work, they've been doing it the same way along. time, right? And what's interesting about that is that if you look at the, you look at the data, it's just based on this morphological grade. And what we've found is that sometimes embryos that are day two, that are day three or day five, in non-model species, and in some model species like mice, they aren't, they look like they're not, they wouldn't be the winner of the race morphologically at that stage where most humans make their decision. But if you go a little bit

longer, they actually are the healthiest embryo, which is kind of crazy, right? So we as humans are making this decision on probably one of the most important things in our lives, if you go through IVF, with this archaic old system based on this one moment in time and bad imaging, to say the least. So you do that. But what we found is that, you know, things will speed up and things will slow down at these different stages. So even for us to be successful in artificial womb, we had to build a hydrojohn microfluidics device that actually makes the embryos healthier. And we've actually been able to take embryos in non-model species much further than anyone else has in the world in both mice and as well as in non-model species.

And it's a lot easier to do it in humans. We don't do it in humans. But that same technology could be applied to embryos. And we have a slightly different grading scale that is proving way more efficient and more importantly, way more accurate in both model and non-model species. And that just so just that little innovation, I think, could be pretty transformative to IVF. You know, pal, I want to take us to close here, but give me a sense of how fast this field

is moving, you know, what, you know, the transformations you've experienced over the year or two. And as far as I know, there is no other company out there that's even close. to what you have built in terms of production pipeline. Yes. So, obviously, I'm biased. Disclosure. I am too.

Yeah, we're both biased. But I will say, objectively, two years ago, three years ago, we were doing victory lapse when we did a couple edits. And I think that's where most people are doing it. We're now doing hundreds of edits at a time. And when we were doing a couple edits, we were getting like 40% efficiency. And we're like, that's pretty good. Most people were doing 15.

We're really smart. But then now we're doing hundreds of edits at 90% efficiency. I think in the coming years, that's thousands of edits. And those are not linear repeats, meaning they're all over the genome. They're completely, and they're very precise to the point that I would feel comfortable that that technology could be applied to human health care. We're not going to do it, but we'd spend it out or license it, right? Because we are pretty myopically focused on biodiversity and de-extinction at the

core. But no one's near that. No one's even near that. But even two years ago, we thought we were by far the best based on every single standard, which was interesting. I will say that what we're finding also from DNA synthesis, we've now put in, at least from what we, unless there's secret, something we haven't seen, based on research and based on it was published. And a lot of scientists love to take the victory laps pretty early in the journals. So based on what we've seen, You know, we've surpassed the largest delivery by 5x already. I think that will be at 20x before the end of this year. And so the DNA synthesis, large cargo delivery, and the clustering models that we have are, you know, very superior.

But at the same time, I do think that, you know, I think part of the reason for that, though, is because we have taken a product in systems model approach to synthetic biology, leveraging AI. whereas most people are trying to solve one-off point solutions for human health care. So they have different goals. So I can understand why they have different ambition levels. But for us to be able to understand genotype-to-phenotype expression and being able to do it all over the genome, it's just a different set of challenges. But I think I do think in the coming years that hopefully the models that we are applying and the way we're thinking about it applies broader to synthetic. biology. And you're taking these capabilities and spinning out companies. We want to stay very focused. And so, like, we're opportunists and we're capitalists, but at the same time, we think some of these

problems are very hard. And we want dedicated teams on them, right? And so de-extinction species preservation, we think it's a, you know, $10 trillion opportunity. But we think it's also one of the most important things to focus on. And we think it's solving the hardest things in biology. But, If we say, oh, we get a great discovery on plastics and we can spend some resources on it, then we invent that here, and then we spend it out and we put incredible women and men to then go work on that, right? And we bring in the right capital and attention to it. It's a part of the ecosystem. We build intercompany agreements where we share the editing efficiencies and whatnot that we develop so it can help them.

So it is a really interesting ecosystem of how we approach this. But fundamentally, you know, I don't ever want to spread ourselves too thin. Focus on the platform, focus on biodiversity and de-extinction, but then these, you know, bring in women and men that then can go run those. But they're typically seated by us with the scientific team internally that built it.