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 the oxygen transfer capacity of a natural eggshell under normal atmospheric conditions created by Colossal’s material science team. The result is a device compatible with standard commercial incubators, manufacturable at scale, and adaptable to eggs of any size.
“Every new scalable system for de-extinction is ultimately a biology problem wrapped in an engineering problem. The artificial egg is a perfect example, said Ben Lamm, CEO and Co-Founder at Colossal Biosciences. “Restoring species like the South Island Giant Moa isn’t just about reconstructing ancient genomes and editing PGCs — it requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists and scales in ways that ordinary biology simply doesn’t. At Colossal, we didn’t just replicate the egg; we re-engineered it from first principles to create something more scalable and controllable. This is what multidisciplinary science makes possible — bringing together biology, materials science, and engineering to solve one of nature’s most elegant systems. It’s a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit.”
THE ENGINEERING BREAKTHROUGH
The Colossal artificial egg achieves ambient oxygen sufficiency through a novel bioengineered silicone-based membrane lattice that matches and exceeds the oxygen transfer capacity of a natural chicken eggshell at 21% atmospheric O₂, eliminating the need for hyperoxic supplementation that limited prior attempts from scaling and negatively impacted the long-term health of the developing chick. The platform has demonstrated end-to-end success, with healthy viable chicks successfully hatched from the fully artificial construct. Its largely transparent design also enables continuous, real-time observation of embryo development and phenotypic expression throughout incubation, supporting direct visual confirmation of developmental milestones – a significant capability for de-extinction science where visual confirmation of edited lost traits is critical.
The lattice shell was 3D printed and designed for transition to injection molding for low-cost, high-volume production. It is explicitly size-scalable, with additional versions already under development that extend beyond the dimensions of any available surrogate species.
“The embryo needs a place to grow that recapitulates the gas exchange, humidity, and mechanical environment of a natural egg — at whatever size the species requires. Colossal’s artificial egg solves the scalability dimension. It is a platform technology, and its implications extend well beyond any single species.” said Dr. George Church, Co-Founder of Colossal and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
The platform continues to advance through active refinement. Additional future engineering updates include the development of a self-hatching lattice structure, along with robotic-assisted earlier-stage embryo transfer protocols to reduce variability in starting material.
“The avian reproductive toolkit has lagged behind mammalian systems for decades because birds present unique developmental challenges.The artificial egg changes that. For species where surrogacy is impossible and genome recovery has outpaced our ability to use it, this is the missing piece: a controlled, scalable environment for development that is not limited by the availability of a host. It enables us to build critical internal expertise in avian exogenous development that does not exist elsewhere and will be essential across any de-extinction approach,” said Dr Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer of Colossal.
ENABLING AVIAN DE-EXTINCTION
The South Island Giant Moa (Dinornis robustus) presents an incubation challenge unlike any other species in Colossal’s portfolio. Moa eggs are estimated to have been approximately 80 times the volume of a chicken egg and roughly eight times the volume of an emu egg, placing them entirely beyond the capacity of any available avian surrogate. No living bird is large enough to serve as a host. A size-scaled artificial egg is the best route to exogenous development for this species, making the platform not just useful for the moa program but essential to it.
“We’ve created a novel shell-less culture system that is fully scalable and biologically accurate,” said Professor Andrew Pask, Chief Biology Officer at Colossal. “It’s a new system designed for long-term, healthy avian embryo development. The genome is the blueprint, but without a place to build, it’s meaningless. The artificial egg gives us that platform: controlled, scalable, and completely independent of a surrogate. It’s species-agnostic, size-scalable, and unlocks entirely new pathways — from rescuing endangered birds with low hatch success to enabling de-extinction where no surrogate exists. We designed it with one priority: producing healthy animals that can thrive, not just hatch – mirroring the natural egg as much as possible.”
CONSERVATION APPLICATIONS
Colossal’s artificial egg expands what’s possible in avian biology at a time of accelerating biodiversity loss, with more than half of bird species in decline, one in eight threatened with extinction, and nearly 3 billion birds lost in North America since 1970.
Beyond de-extinction, the platform addresses longstanding constraints in avian biology and has broad applications for conservation of threatened species. Many critically endangered birds are difficult to breed in captivity, and limited surrogate availability restricts the use of biobanked genetic material. The artificial egg provides a controlled environment for bird development that reduces environmental variability, enables rescue of compromised embryos, and removes the constraint of egg size from the production of healthy chicks.
It also advances avian genome engineering by enabling continuous, real-time access to developing embryos, allowing more precise and reproducible intervention and improved control of developmental conditions. This supports work in disease resistance, genetic rescue, and related applications.
Finally, the platform introduces true scalability for avian mass production, enabling standardized deployment across species and production volumes, and creating a controllable, industry-ready framework for biological research that has not previously been possible.
“The ability to incubate avian embryos outside a biological shell — at any size and in standard commercial incubators — is a capability conservation programs simply don’t have today. We’re building it for the moa, but it’s designed to support critically endangered species broadly,” said Matt James, Chief Animal Officer and head of The Colossal Foundation. “This represents a new platform for avian conservation. The artificial egg allows us to rescue compromised embryos, build genetic rescue platforms, and utilize donor and biobanked material in ways that weren’t previously possible. It reflects deep collaboration across biology, engineering, and software — and opens entirely new pathways to help address the biodiversity crisis.”
BIOTECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS
Beyond conservation and de-extinction, the artificial egg has potential applications in biotechnology research, particularly in the development of genome-edited avian lines. Transgenic chickens are an emerging platform for producing recombinant therapeutic proteins in egg white, including monoclonal antibodies and human cytokines, at costs that are lower than conventional mammalian cell culture systems. A persistent bottleneck in developing these lines is the embryo manipulation required to introduce edited primordial germ cells and confirm germline transmission. The artificial egg’s transparent design, engineered modular architecture and controlled environment provide direct, continuous access to the developing embryo throughout incubation, supporting the precision and reproducibility that genome editing workflows require. This positions the platform as a potentially useful tool for avian biotechnology research well beyond Colossal’s own programs.
“While we built this system to solve a specific de-extinction biological scale problem, the platform we created has implications well beyond de-extinction. Any field that needs precise, scalable access to developing avian embryos now has a tool that didn’t exist before.” said Ben Lamm, CEO and Co-Founder at Colossal Biosciences.
COLOSSAL’S GROWING TOOLKIT
The artificial egg joins a growing suite of technologies Colossal has developed across its de-extinction and conservation programs designed to support gestation of embryos. This includes implantation devices that support early mammalian embryonic development and the Colossal Artificial Uterus to support the later stages of embryo growth across a range of our focus species from marsupials to placental mammals.
Lamm said the team has been working on the artificial egg for about two years.
“We didn’t want to just reinvent the egg. We want to completely re-engineer it from the ground up,” Lamm said. “We wanted to create more access to the developing embryo. We wanted to create the right curvature so that we could overexpress the top viewing window.”
Colossal wanted to ensure that it could create a scalable system that had the ability to consistently deliver healthy animals to term. And then the team also cared about ensuring that there are individual port windows for the imaging system and light diffusion system, so that light isn’t hitting directly into the different wavelengths. Light isn’t hitting directly into the chamber, so it doesn’t hurt the embryo, he said.
“There’s a lot that went into it, even just the designing of the polymer that makes up that plastic coating on the inside,” he said.
Creating this kind of artificial egg was key to bringing the South Island Giant Moa back from extinction. And that species’ eggs were normally about eight times the size of an Emu, he said.
“What we decided to do was start looking at having our dev teams think through the various paths to make it where we could engineer and leverage a large surrogate, like an Emu, but then do an egg transfer, so that you can then do supplementation into the egg, so that you can then grow a South Island giant MOA without the need for a surrogate that’s significantly larger,” he said.
The team had to design the polymer and work out the material science so that the gas exchange for the internal component would work. And the team had to figure out what that gas system would be from a size perspective. They went with hexagon-based designs for structural integrity, but then also had to consider the amount of surface area to volume that they could get in that gas exchange into a permeable membrane, because eggs need to breathe.
The team also had to figure out how to change the curvature of the egg.
“We’re creating a different amount of surface area volume at the top because we want this large viewing window,” Lamm said. “When you’re doing that, it’s still covered in our membrane, but you’re changing the integrity of the egg as it relates to pressure and curvature for the developing embryo.”
“The slope of the curvature inside is different, and it’s at a different pitch than that of the of a traditional egg, because we have to overcompensate for where we’re creating that flat structure on top, and then even at the bottom, you’ll notice there’s little what looks like slots. Those have slight variance to them in terms of their angle, so that we can put it into our light and imaging cradle that that didn’t have light refract off of those so that you can have different wavelengths of light,” he said.
Too much light on the embryo can cause it harm.
“There is a ton of engineering challenges that went into that,” he said.
With the Giant Moa, there is no bird species that is big enough to carry the eggs to terms as a surrogate.
“What the artificial egg gives us is the ability to do is scale different egg sizes so that you don’t use a surrogate to get your initial embryo, and then do transfer and supplementation into the egg,” he said.
The device has hached over 26 chickens. All of those birds are alive in the avian facility.
“We’re now in the process of scaling the egg up so that we can leverage it for different use cases, like like Emus, and then eventually things like the South Island Giant Moa,” he said.
Other uses for the tech
Beyond de-extinction, Lamm said the artificial egg could be “massively helpful for conservation, and leveraging the system for where you don’t have viable surrogates for conservation. You could leverage this system or you have a small population,
and then make this available in some way.”
Lamm said, “Anybody that wants to leverage this technology for avian conservation can. And then there are also applications for human drug development. People have been leveraging chicken eggs and others to for virus production and vaccine development for quite some time.”
The next step is scaling the system and leverage robotics for the production.
Since the artificial egg is reusable, it will bring down cost.
“We’re very, very excited. We’ve been talking about artificial wombs in our exo dev work now for years. It’s the first product line that’s coming out in delivery from that,” he said.