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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today congratulated Colossal Biosciences on its widely covered “woolly mouse,” the gene-edited rodent the Dallas company unveiled this week as a proof of concept on its path to a mammoth-like calf by 2028. Furnetics used the occasion to remind the industry of a line it often blurs: the difference between bringing something back and building something new.

Colossal, founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church, reached a reported valuation north of ten billion dollars earlier this year and has drawn headlines for its de-extinction program — the mammoth, the thylacine, the dodo, and an in-development dire wolf effort. The woolly mouse itself was engineered with multiple simultaneous edits across genes tied to hair and fat metabolism, traits meant to echo the cold-adapted biology of the mammoth.

Furnetics called the work “genuinely impressive museum engineering.”

“We want to be fair. The mouse is a technical achievement. But strip away the mammoth romance and what you have is a description of our platform with a tusk drawn on it. We have been building chimeric lineages forward, toward organisms adapted for what is coming, not reconstructing organisms optimised for an ice age that ended.”

— Dr. Ines Marchetti-Roux, Chief Scientific Officer and Director of the Hephaestus Group

The foundational methods now generating de-extinction press — the parallel edits, the induced pluripotent lineages propagated from a single source — are the same methods Furnetics pioneered and continues to advance under its Chimeric Lineage Platform, elements of which the corporation has previously cited as prior art in patent proceedings before the USPTO.

Thessaly Brandt, Vice President of Corporate Strategy, put it in blunter commercial terms.

“De-extinction is the most beautifully financed nostalgia in the history of science. It is resurrection-as-a-service. A mammoth is a bet you place today and settle in four years, contingent on an elephant’s gestation and a great deal of biology no one at any company controls. We do not build creatures to win back yesterday. We build lineages and legacies for tomorrow. Who do you think is really at the frontier of science?”

— Thessaly Brandt, Vice President, Corporate Strategy

Dr. Marchetti-Roux praised Colossal’s talent pipeline and called the woolly mouse “a gift to the whole field’s credibility,” noting that public excitement about engineered mammals lifts every serious laboratory working in the space, Furnetics included.