2024 ANNUAL REPORT

Our goal is to accelerate the adoption of synthetic alternatives to protect horseshoe crabs and the ecosystems that rely on these living fossils.

American horseshoe crabs are vital to coastal ecosystems, yet approximately 1.1 million crabs are harvested annually for their blood, which pharmaceutical companies use to test for endotoxins (contaminants) in drugs and vaccines. This practice is not only ecologically unsustainable but also lethal for up to 30% of bled crabs. There are animal-free synthetic alternatives for endotoxin testing created through genetic engineering, and some pharmaceutical companies have begun to make the transition away from horseshoe crab blood.

2024 Accomplishments
In collaboration with conservation, advocacy, and pharmaceutical industry partners, this effort has achieved several significant milestones:

• Launching the Sustainability Scorecard for Endotoxin Testing, which tracks and measures pharmaceutical companies’ progress as they transition to synthetic alternatives
• The US Pharmacopeia’s final approval of Chapter 86 in November 2024 offers guidance for using synthetic alternatives for endotoxin testing
• The continued development of the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition, uniting over 30 organizations

Next Steps
The Sustainability Scorecard will accelerate the pharmaceutical industry’s transition to using synthetic alternatives for drug and vaccine safety testing. This initiative will help ensure accountability and transparency to the public as companies adopt sustainable, animal-free alternatives to horseshoe crab blood. Our focus will remain on raising public awareness, accelerating the transition to synthetic alternatives, and ensuring the long-term survival of horseshoe crabs and the ecosystems that depend on them.

 “There is no excuse to continue using horseshoe crab blood when readily available alternatives are recognized as equivalent. This decision by USP presents a tremendous opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to rise to the occasion and do the right thing.”

-Ryan Phelan, Executive Director & Co-founder

Our goal is to move black-footed ferrets from their current state of conservation reliance to a future in which they can be independent of human help. 

While other partners restore and secure habitat, we are working to accomplish two critical goals: 1) to increase genetic diversity for long-term viability and 2) to provide genetic resilience to sylvatic plague, which threatens their full recovery. 

2024 Accomplishments
Our program made history this year when a black-footed ferret clone named Antonia became a mother, giving birth to Sibert and Red Cloud at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Antonia is a clone of Willa, who died in 1988 with no descendants. Before our cloning efforts, all black-footed ferrets were descended from just 7 wild founders saved from extinction in the 1980s. Antonia’s kits officially make Willa an eigth founder of the species—dramatically increasing available genetic diversity. 

This is the first time a clone of an endangered species has reproduced successfully to help save its species, and the first time pre-bottleneck genetic diversity has been restored to an endangered species. The latter is a capability only possible with biotechnology.

Next Steps 
Proving cloning as a viable tool for the breeding program was necessary for our next step: delivering a long-term solution to sylvatic plague. We are currently funding research into multiple forms of inheritable resilience, including a genetic vaccine and allele replacement. Either approach could allow the species to thrive in the face of disease outbreaks. In the future, these technologies could save other wild species from extinction.

As for Antonia, Sibert, and Red Cloud, we hope their family grows in years to come! 

We are grateful for our partners in this critical work: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, ViaGen Pets & Equine, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and our incredible donors. None of our work would be possible without your belief in our shared mission. Thank you.

Our goal is to overcome the scientific challenges facing bird biotechnology and revolutionize conservation.

Every revolution needs an army—ours is the International Avian Genetic Rescue Consortium. We’ve been gathering scientists and conservationists to grow this community, building a shared vision to save birds with biotechnology.

2024 Accomplishments
Our 11 funded teams are working to make breakthroughs never achieved before—from culturing primordial germ cells of diverse species, stem cells for reproduction, rewriting bird genomes, to hatching doves from quail eggs! With foundational science in place, teams are on their way to exciting experiments in 2025. Biotechnologies to help endangered birds will soon move from hypothetical science to plausible applications. The Consortium is pivotal to this transition. In 2024, we gathered Consortium members from eight nations in person for the first time in Toronto for an intensive 3-day workshop.

Our funded scientists and others presented their work developing a range of cellular, reproductive, and gene editing tools. Conservationists showcased their incredible efforts to save birds, including heroic stories of rescuing South African vultures, establishing new Pacific seabird breeding colonies, and breeding back American grouse and quail from near extinction. 

Next steps
Combining their expertise, we asked participants to brainstorm the next “big ideas” to push biotechnology concepts further. The three big, final ideas were:

• Discovering candidate genes to fill the immense knowledge gaps for climate adaptation
• Developing chickens to lay eggs of dozens of wild bird species, to use as an ingenious disease or pathology array to get ahead of outbreaks and test treatments
• Perhaps the most ambitious: envisioning the tools necessary to recover a viable species from just a single, sole surviving member or a frozen cell line!

These ideas are thrilling, and one day may come to fruition, but conservationists need tools in the present to safeguard avian diversity: enter biobanking. Conservationists new to the Consortium were shown how to collect key biosamples from birds at different life stages. Using these new skills, and dissection kits gifted upon departure, they will be able to biobank critical genetic diversity of the species they are working to save–enabling future genetic rescue options as yet to be imagined.

Our goal is to integrate novel biotechnologies with existing coral conservation approaches to advance the scale, efficiency, and success of reef restoration.

Coral reefs are the literal building blocks of ecosystems, supporting a quarter of the ocean’s species. They also protect coastline communities and support livelihoods for over a billion people. However, they face unprecedented threats from climate change, pollution, disease, and overfishing. Our Advanced Coral Toolkit (ACT) provides urgently needed genetic rescue solutions to help restore resilient coral reefs that can survive in the 21st century. 

2024 Accomplishments
Now entering its fifth year, the Advanced Coral Toolkit encompasses a variety of innovative capabilities with enormous potential to transform coral restoration efforts. To date, we have awarded more than $8 million across 13 projects. Awardees have pioneered first-of-their-kind efforts that push the boundaries of coral conservation practice. These include cryopreserving coral fragments to safeguard genetic diversity, transplanting stem cells between corals to transfer resilience, creating portable devices that diagnose coral stress in near-real-time, and developing probiotics to treat deadly disease outbreaks.

Advanced Coral Toolkit highlights:

• One People One Reef: In Ulithi, Micronesia, we fund work to integrate traditional knowledge and practices with scientific tools (including genomic sequencing, metabolomics, and eDNA). This project has been so successful that the communities on Ulithi have created an atoll-wide management plan informed by this toolkit, demonstrating how to develop sustainable, community-driven conservation approaches. 
• Coral stem cells: A new study demonstrates, for the first time, the isolation and transplantation of stem cells in Hexacorallia. This subclass of cnidarians includes beloved creatures like stony corals and sea anemones. The study marks a pivotal step towards genetic therapies to advance coral restoration and resilience. It is also an important step forward for marine species for whom the derivation of cell cultures has been challenging.
• Coral Probiotics: Awardees at UNCW completed the development of a high-throughput platform for isolating, culturing, and testing hundreds of bacterial strains as potential probiotics to prevent and treat the devastating stony coral tissue loss disease. They are currently testing different strains and delivery methods in Florida, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos, with the goal of scaling to save diseased corals and increase restoration success.
• Corals: On the Brink: a short documentary, featuring Ryan Phelan and ACT awardee Line Bay (Australian Institute of Marine Science), explored how emerging technologies can increase coral resilience to climate change.
• Dubai Future Forum: Program Manager Liv Williamson attended the Dubai Future Forum, where she spoke about Revive & Restore’s novel applications of biotechnology to improve conservation outcomes.

Next Steps 
In 2025, we will transition the most promising technologies to scale or to field applications and optimize them by integrating feedback from restoration practitioners. In addition to awarding new grants to address the most daunting threats that corals face, we also plan to explore applications of the technologies our awardees have proven in corals to other marine species in need of novel conservation solutions.