"De-Extinction" Company Colossal Launches Form Bio to Maximize Tech

L to R: Andrew Busey, Co-CEO, Form Bio, Brandi Cantarel, Ph.D., Director of Bioinformatics, Form Bio, Kent Wakeford, Co-CEO, Form Bio, Claire Aldridge, Ph.D., Chief Strategy Officer, Form Bio, Ben Lamm, Co-Founder, Form Bio and Co-Founder & CEO, Colossal Biosciences/courtesy Form Bio

Colossal Biosciences recently made headlines for its “de-extinction” efforts with the thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmania tiger. On Tuesday, the company announced it is spinning out its computational platform into a new company called Form Bio, thanks to a $30 million investment deal to accelerate this technology. 

The company previously announced a project to bring back the woolly mammoth.  

The new investment, made by Thomas Tull, is twice the initial investment Colossal received to launch last year. Tull founded the movie production company that produces the “Batman” series.  

The new company is backed by $30 million in venture capital, led by JAZZ Venture Partners. 

“With rising geo-political tensions, now, more than ever, the U.S. needs to be investing in technologies and tools that help keep us competitive across the intelligence front,” Tull said. 

Colossal is attempting, in the case of the woolly mammoth, to reprogram elephant DNA and has targeted 60 genes as candidates for tweaking.  

Colossal co-founders Ben Lamm, a software entrepreneur, and Harvard Medical School biologist George Church launched the company on the back of CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing technology.  

Lamm told BioSpace Colossal scientists and engineers have since created much of the necessary computational and work-a-day software from scratch.   

Lamm and Colossal representatives said their software can be used by other life sciences companies for similar uses.  

“When you have a big scientific endeavor like de-extincting a species, you not only need the smartest scientists in the world, you need powerful software, much of which simply hasn’t existed until now," Lamm said.  

It can design systems for drug discovery, gene and cell therapy, manufacturing efficiency and academic research, according to Form Bio. 

Claire Aldridge, Form Bio’s chief strategy officer, told BioSpace that computational biology is now “truly capturing the promise of the genomics revolution.”  

It cost $3 billion to sequence the complete genome of a person more than two decades ago. This has now dropped to about $100 currently, said Form Bio Co-CEO Kent Wakeford. 

“All that data isn’t worth anything if we can’t interpret it,” Wakeford told BioSpace.  

Form Bio aims to create software, so scientists can work more efficiently. 

"When biologists are spending time learning how to create and wrangle Python scripts or trying to organize terabytes of data, they're not doing biology," Wakeford and co-CEO Andrew Busey wrote on Form Bio's website Tuesday. 

Form Bio’s software aims to solve two major problems: make manufacturing more efficient and reduce immune responses to bio-manufactured products, Aldridge said.  

Most bio-manufactured products experience some spoilage. Computational software can guide engineers and scientists to use the most efficient processes to increase output.  

“Computer-aided design, fabrication, testing analyses and machine learning are key to the future of bioengineering in general and specifically the oration of endangered and extinct genetic diversity for keystone species in vital ecosystems,” Church said.