The Thalion Initiative is a global researcher driven initiative focused on the fundamental biology of aging. US Head Office. Visit @TheThalionInit in Canada
Boston, MA
Joined December 2024
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The impact of age-related diseases happen sooner than you think. Welcome to the Thalion Initiative...
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Fantastic interview 👀
BREAKING: Inside $12 Billion @colossal Biosciences + Colossal Spinout 'Astromech' Announces $20M Raise at $3.8 Billion
Woolly Mice, Dire Wolves, & AI-Driven Biotech
"We are one of the most undervalued companies in the world."
"[AI x Biotech] is truly exploding. You're gonna see this Precambrian explosion of new drugs & new therapies that all come from AI-assisted drug design & discovery."
Co-Founder & CEO @BenLamm
Up to 50% of all biodiversity is forecast to be lost in the next 25 years. Asian elephants get cancer at 2% to 3%, humans at 24% to 25%. That gap is the thesis behind both companies.
Colossal has raised $635M in total to date. CEO Lamm says each round was 2X oversubscribed, including a most recent round planned for $200M that closed at $400M. Six target species, 260-plus employees, 55,000 sqft Texas HQ, & no animal has ever been sold.
Astromech is the AI-driven predictive biology startup spun out of Colossal that aims to forecast how biological systems, evolution, & diseases will change over time. Astromech has raised $60M total. $30M in 2025, a $10.5M extension reported in April, & now $20M led by Bob Nelsen with Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, & CAZ Investments. Valuation moved from $2B in March to $3.8B today. Co-founded by Lamm & George Church.
On the spinouts: "When new ideas & technologies arise that have other applications outside of de-extinction & species preservation, we spin them out or license the technology so our core teams can focus on Colossal's mission."
Colossal Spinouts:
› Form Bio, 2022, computational life sciences platform
› Breaking, plastic degradation using Colossal bioengineering
› Astromech, 2026, evolutionary AI
› Artificial wombs, next in line, tech expected ready in ~2027, with human fertility applications
We cover:
› Astromech, AI for Biology
› Gene drives, screwworm, and a half trillion dollar invasive species market
› Woolly mice from edit design to live animals in 30 days
› The Viagen acquisition and 80% cloning efficiency
› Artificial wombs, IVF, & germline applications
› $635M raised & why every round was oversubscribed
› The no-go list on human and primate work
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Ben Lamm, Co-Founder & CEO at Colossal Biosciences
(01:07) Inside Colossal's De-Extinction Lab
(05:07) Every wall in this lab has a purpose
(06:02) The AI idea that could save the planet
(08:09) What Colossal is building next
(08:28) Revealing Colossal's woolly mice
(10:49) Wild requests they get every day
(13:35) Colossal's business model
(15:07) How Colossal raised $635 million
(20:17) How AI is converging with Biotech
(22:44) How ancient DNA actually gets to the lab
(26:24) The real stats behind Mass Extinction
(32:07) Will their animals ever live in the wild?
(34:58) Building this company with no background in Biology
(41:44) Choosing their earliest backers
(52:51) Why they refuse to work on Humans
(58:07) Are they secretly working on Aliens?
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Had fun chatting with @NautilusMag about Gerophysics and recent advances, and what it means for the field of aging biology!
Could Physics Help Us Solve the Mystery of Aging? nautil.us/could-physics-help…
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
It is our pleasure!
As part of @TTIScience's Computational Biology program we're focused on building resources that cater to aging research, and protecting the investments the research community has made is part of that. – at Ottawa, Ontario
A few months ago, we faced some challenges keeping our online resources running due to a lack of funding.
Thanks to the generous support of the longevity community, we were able to keep them online. We've now migrated our largest resources to a new server hosted by the Thalion Initiative, which will help reduce our operating costs and give us some breathing room while we seek additional funding.
A huge thank you to @DToddWhite @MaxUnfried and @TTIScience for hosting our genome resources, including the bowhead whale and naked mole-rat genome resources, as well as GeneFriends, helping us continue to serve the research community.
Thank you! 🙏
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
A few months ago, we faced some challenges keeping our online resources running due to a lack of funding.
Thanks to the generous support of the longevity community, we were able to keep them online. We've now migrated our largest resources to a new server hosted by the Thalion Initiative, which will help reduce our operating costs and give us some breathing room while we seek additional funding.
A huge thank you to @DToddWhite @MaxUnfried and @TTIScience for hosting our genome resources, including the bowhead whale and naked mole-rat genome resources, as well as GeneFriends, helping us continue to serve the research community.
Thank you! 🙏
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Have we been looking at RNA changes during ageing the wrong way? 🧬
In our new study we use a largely overlooked technique called spike-in normalisation to investigate age-related changes in transcripts across mouse cell types.
A thread 🧵
1/6
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
@adamgries' last point is the key. Most philanthropy is unambitious, serves a tax purpose, and provides virtue signaling at the country club. Very few philanthropic entities are about advancing civilization and discovery or solving problems from first principles. 1/3
Mostly, but not true for substantial parts of science.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped launch modern molecular biology. The Wellcome Trust was a cornerstone of the Human Genome Project. HHMI funded scientists behind CRISPR and optogenetics. The Allen Institute created open brain atlases used by labs around the world.
The existence of ineffective or poorly aligned charities doesn’t negate the extraordinary track record of philanthropic capital when it’s directed toward innovation rather than perpetual service delivery.
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Last week at Longevity Summit Dublin I spoke about Open Questions in Reproductive Aging and Female Longevity. The talk was inspired by @jpsenescence's paper mapping 100 open problems in aging against > 200,000 PubMed papers (post Thalion roadmapping workshop in Birmingham 2024).
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
The aging science and gerophysics community should really try to figure out why hazard ratio of supercentenarian seems to be constant?
Is there a evolutionary argument to be made? Seems unlikely that selection pressure is at work.
Is there a thermodynamic argument where entropy has reached a maximum? More damage does not matter anymore?
A cheat code to the programed theory of aging?
Lots to explore!
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Impressive advancements in IVG, early follicle and ovaroids from Conception! This space is getting really exciting
I’m so excited to share this update on @Conception –
We’ve generated the first early human eggs derived from stem cells.
This is a big deal -- the potential to redefine fertility is real.
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
1. AI companies hyping AI for drug development are doing it as they need a story
2. Spending 5% of the cost for computing on collecting real world data in a standardized manner would go a long way and is probably a better long term ROI then just scaling models.
Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it.
She has spent her whole career inside the actual frontier of curing disease.
So when she talks about what AI can and cannot do in biology, she is not guessing. She is reporting from inside the lab.
Her words were blunt. She is not seeing chatbots innovate. They summarize data. They write reports. They do not come up with a brand new idea nobody has ever had.
Then the interviewer pushed. So you're saying AI can't innovate?
Doudna did not flinch. She does not know if it can't. She just does not see it doing it right now.
This lands harder when you remember who is making the opposite case. Sam Altman says AI will eliminate disease within five years. Larry Ellison says AI will cure cancer in a 48 hour window.
An OpenAI executive even floated that the company should get a cut of sales on any drug discovered through ChatGPT. Doudna answered that in two words. Good luck.
Even the cancer specialists Altman is selling to keep warning that cancer is not one disease but hundreds, each needing its own cure, and that compute does not skip the years of lab work.
Her reason is simpler. Biology is hard. You cannot simulate your way to an understanding of the human body.
The people promising cures are the ones selling the tool.
The person who actually won a Nobel building them is telling you it has not happened yet.
Source: Bloomberg Originals
Watch the full video on their official channel.
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Biology humbles me almost daily. Recently found out mice can put their pregnancy on pause. The whole embryo stays in suspended animation for a period of time at the blastocyst stage. This happens when a mouse has just had a litter but gets pregnant again right away. Her energy and resources are spent nursing the pups and can’t also support developing the next batch (it also happens during starvation in the wild). It’s called diapause - yes, like the worms.
Despite running breeding trials for years, I didn’t know this because we separate the mother and pups from the males until they wean. So I only found out from a poster years later. And apparently over 130 species can do it. How crazy is that?
When I get past the shock and horror of my own ignorance, it’s incredible to think about biological timing and all the intense work the embryo is doing during that time. There seems to be a clear uncoupling of biological and chronological time. As we know from the Gladyshev lab’s work, epigenetic age goes down until gastrulation (to reach ground zero), and then it starts increasing again. So during that process of rejuvenation, it can just… halt - from 1 week normally to a month+ (bears can do 4-7 months). And amazingly, the resulting offspring seem completely fine despite that temporal disruption but we haven’t measured lifespan as far as I know.
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
A few companies working on gametogenesis. It’s done in mice. In humans we have primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs) but it’s harder to make these proto-eggs mature. What’s harder is constructing the actual follicle and ideally ovarian tissue, but that’s what would be useful not just for IVF but also menopause
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Congratulations! Big win for longevity drug discovery!
We have just reached $34M in total funding, with new money coming to advance our preclinical pipeline.
Now, we’re accelerating our transition from science and discovery engine to a preclinical-stage drug developer, on track to pioneer a new class of medicines targeting aging and chronic diseases in humans.
Our theories and models can now be put to a test and see translation into therapeutics that could dramatically affect lifespan in our species.
Read more on this news: businesswire.com/news/home/2…
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Gero has been named a 2026 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for Advancing the Physics of Aging in Drug Discovery
Gero’s physics-first AI drug discovery platform is transforming breakthroughs in the physics of aging into a pipeline of medicines designed to treat age-related diseases and slow the aging process itself.
We're especially glad that the World Economic Forum and Davos platform will help us educate the community and lead the conversation on a question we believe defines the next decade of medicine: treating aging as a new pharmaceutical category, one we are working to define.
Gero has just been selected as a 2026 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum (@wef).
For over a decade I've approached #aging as a physicist: not as a collection of isolated diseases to treat after they appear, but as a macroscopic process driven by the accumulation of entropic damage and the loss of resilience in a complex system. That framework is what led us to found @hacking_aging.
At Gero, we use physics-informed models on large-scale clinical data to separate aging itself from specific disease trajectories. Our goal is straightforward: identify ways to slow the underlying rate of functional decline before reversible stress turns into irreversible collapse. Stop the clock where it matters most — on the processes that erode healthspan.
This recognition from the WEF is a strong validation of that direction. Looking forward to connecting with the other pioneers and pushing these ideas further.
➡️Read the full announcement: businesswire.com/news/home/2…
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
The biology is ready? ...to be studied, sure. That's why we need funding.
Nice proof-of-concept grant opportunity for repro aging
The biology is ready. The researchers are ready. The funding hasn't kept up...until now.
@ResearchHub is offering $10k for research on reproductive longevity.
🧵
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Are biophysical constraints biology's underrated variable?
We focus mostly on signalling molecules but this new paper from @PetrovaLab shows that a physical constraint like osmotic pressure can block lymphatic vessel growth even when growth factors are abundant. So it's not controlling it instead of signalling but alongside it like an independent gate.
If we remove AQP1 (might have heard of this water channel, Nobel-winning discovery, etc) , gut lymphatics shorten, fat absorption fails, mice gain less weight on a high-fat diet. The physical microenvironment is a co-determinant in the process.
Another curious thing is the context-specificity: AQP1 marks stress-adaptive lymphangiogenesis in the gut, lymphedema, and inflammation but not in normal embryonic development. We see different programs, depending on physical context.
Maybe biology is more mechanical than the dominant frameworks suggest.
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Great piece on comparative biology and what it can teach us about aging by @Aria_Babu . Humans are already outliers. Most mammals get 1 billion heartbeats, we get 2 billion; we live decades past reproduction and way longer than animals our size. Yet there's so much more to learn from other species that can repair DNA, avoid cancer, or regenerate.
worksinprogress.co/isue/the-…
The Thalion Initiative (US) retweeted
Did they just discover cellular bombs? Biology is so much fun
New-found immune cells called ‘ruptoblasts’ explode when triggered, ejecting toxic chemicals capable of delivering death to surrounding cells in just minutes. The cells’ discoverers say that this process, which they call ruptosis, seems to be a new form of cell death.
go.nature.com/4x3SZBT
A great snapshot of the field, and good to see the recognition of comparative and evolutionary biology in this report - we're betting a lot on it @TTIScience.
