Advancing stem cell technologies to restore fertility, engineer disease resistance, and accelerate adaptation in wildlife.
Stem Cell Technologies
Revive & Restore’s newest program supports projects that are developing stem cell technology as a way to achieve offspring for endangered species, fight wildlife disease, and engineer resilience in today’s changing world.
Wildlife populations are declining at an alarming rate, and we need innovative solutions to save species from extinction. Integral to human medicine, pluripotent stem cells are unspecialized cells with the capacity to become any cell type in the body, including sperm and eggs. Excitingly, they can be generated noninvasively from other cells through the process known as ‘reprogramming’.
Stem cells could unlock new conservation technologies for fertility restoration, engineering disease resistance, and accelerating adaptation to climate change. Conservation challenges that stem cell technologies might be used to mitigate include:
- Limited reproductive capabilities
- Susceptibility to disease
- Dwindling genetic diversity
- Poor adaptation to change
The Opportunity
Converting biobanked samples to stem cells has the potential to create a limitless resource for conservation innovation. Yet, stem cell methods are drastically underdeveloped for endangered species. Stem cell technology for wildlife could one day provide:
- A pathway to offspring for endangered species
- Solutions to wildlife disease
- An opportunity for engineered resilience
- An emerging route to produce any type of cell, tissue, organ, or embryo
The world of clinical stem cell research has seen considerable advances in recent years. Translating this technology to wildlife could help rescue species on the brink of extinction.
Program Scope
Three Key Focus Areas for R&D underpin the success of stem cell technologies for genetic rescue, including
- Stem cell derivation optimized for a range of endangered species
- Parallel methods developed to produce sperm, eggs, and embryos for key species
- Resilience to disease and climate change
This program aims to showcase multiple demonstrations of these three outcomes for the species that need it most.
Stem Cell Technology Underway
Our Biotech For Bird Conservation program funds
6 projects
advancing stem cell technologies for avian species
Our Black-Footed Ferret Recovery program funds
3 teams
using stem cells to engineer resilience to sylvatic plague
Our Advanced Coral Toolkit program funds
1 team
using stem cells to enhance thermal resilience in coral
The Applied Stem Cell Conservation Fund
In December 2024, Revive & Restore announced a new fund and a world-first Request For Proposals, aiming to achieve breakthrough advances in universal reprogramming, enabling reproduction, and mitigating wildlife disease.
We received proposals totaling over $12M in requests, demonstrating once and for all that this is an emerging area of research ready to move!
Almost 50 Letters of Intent were submitted by applicants from every inhabited continent, targeting over 80 species from the tiny Monarch butterfly to the great blue whale.
Check out the latest cohort of awarded projects.
Proposed project locations
With proposals coming from 18 countries, the global need and reach of this technology demonstrate its broad relevance and transformative potential for conservation worldwide.
Taxonomic spread
Submitted projects targeted a broad range of species. Stem cell technology is a crucial tool that gives scientists the capacity to harness early developmental stages for a vast range of species.
Advisory Council & Program Manager
Ashlee Hutchinson
Program Manager
Bridget Baumgartner
Special Advisor to Revive & Restore
Alan Trounson
Cartherics, Former President of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine
Keith Alm
CEO, International Society for Stem Cell Research
Martin Pera
The Jackson Laboratory
Jeanne Loring
Emeritus Professor at Scripps Research Institute
Owain Edwards
Entozyme, formally CSIRO
Gabriela Mastromonaco
Senior Director of Wildlife Science, Toronto Zoo
Eriona Hysolli
Harvard University, formally Head of Biological Sciences at Colossal BioSciences
Anne Readel
Promega Corporation
Stem Cell Technologies For Genetic Rescue Workshop
Participants from the 2023 Stem Cell Workshop in La Jolla, California | Revive & Restore
Stem Cell Technology For Genetic Rescue: In San Diego, 2023, Revive & Restore partnered with Promega, The Pershing Square Foundation, and the San Diego Zoo, convening close to 50 leading experts in stem cell research, biobanking, veterinary medicine, and human health to develop a roadmap for translating stem cell technology to biodiversity conservation.
In 2023, we hosted a catalytic workshop with leaders in the field to identify the white space and develop blue-sky ideas to accelerate stem cell technologies for wildlife conservation. Click here to read more about the workshop. See the publications coming out of this event here.
Following the event, all participants co-authored a call-to-action published in Development, October 2024, outlining the profound potential for leveraging this technology. Here, scientists across stem cell R&D appealed to the scientific community to prioritize a comparative approach for developing a deeper understanding of pluripotency across species.
“Pragmatically, pluripotent stem cells provide the tools for genetic rescue, but they also represent a living bioarchive of the diversity of biological inventions and solutions to challenges faced by living systems (including us) on our unique planet – something that we would be foolish to let slip away”
Professor Tom Burdon, The Roslin Institute
Stem Cell Workshop Participant
Publications
Advancing stem cell technologies for conservation of wildlife biodiversity, Development, Oct 2024.
Read the call-to-action to come out of the workshop here
Outside The Box: Comparative Stem Cell Insights For Fertility Biotechnology and Conservation, Fertility & Sterility Reports, April 2025.
The next paper to come out of the seminal workshop elucidates the potential benefit of cross-species comparisons for human clinical R&D when it comes to reproduction. Read the full paper here
Featured Project
Poo also contains cells from the creature that deposited it, shed from the lining of their intestines. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
The Poo Zoo was co-designed with Stem Cell Workshop participant and steering committee member Professor Suzannah Williams of the University of Oxford and involves an exciting collaboration with Chester Zoo.
Prof. Suzannah Williams
This high-risk/high-reward project aims to bypass some of the hurdles associated with obtaining cell cultures from endangered species by establishing a filtration toolkit to derive clean cell cultures from scat samples. This team is sampling poo from some of the special animals at Chester Zoo in the UK, including elephants, giraffes, okapis, and sun bears, and washing it to extract and grow any living cells deposited inside.
The ability to obtain cell lines from animal poo will be a game-changer for biobanking and potentially for stem cell technology, providing a simple and noninvasive way to sample more individuals to better preserve genetic diversity.
The potential to transform primary cell lines into induced pluripotent stem cells opens up an additional array of possibilities, including the robustly demonstrated conversion of stem cells to sperm, eggs, and embryos in mice.
Read the full article here.
News
Revive & Restore is delighted to be sponsoring the upcoming Annual Meeting for the International Society For Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).
Join us in Hong Kong as we announce the first cohort of successful grantees for the Applied Stem Cell Conservation Fund.
Wednesday, June 11th at 6 pm
PLURIPOTENCY FOR THE PLANET: A GLOBAL CALL TO ADVANCE STEM CELL TECHNOLOGY FOR BIODIVERSITY
PLURIPOTENCY FOR THE PLANET: A GLOBAL CALL TO ADVANCE STEM CELL TECHNOLOGY FOR BIODIVERSITY
Meet-Up Hub: Stem Cells for Wildlife Conservation: Innovations and Challenges
Date and Time: Thursday, 12 June, 5:00 PM – 5:45 PM
Date and Time: Thursday, 12 June, 5:00 PM – 5:45 PM
Co-organised by Revive & Restore and Stem Cell Technologies for Genetic Rescue
Workshop speaker Dr. Timo Kohler, University of Cambridge & University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
SynBioBeta – May 2025
Program Manager Dr. Ashlee Hutchinson co-hosted the Pioneering SynBio Innovations: Transforming Industries and Expanding Possibilities at SynBioBeta in San Jose in May 2025.
Check out the Op-Ed published by SynBioBeta showcasing Revive & Restore’s innovative approach to Stem Cell Technology.
Stem Cell Therapy in Coral Restoration
Revive & Restore awardees at the University of Miami and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev extracted, isolated and transplanted the first coral stem cells in a bold project to transfer thermal resilience to combat coral bleaching.
This innovative work marks a pivotal step towards using stem cell technology to aid in the restoration and resilience of these essential marine organisms.
Read the full paper here
Stem Cells And AI
AI is emerging as a powerful accelerator across multiple disciplines. We now have a tremendous opportunity to translate technologies like machine learning to help solve wildlife conservation problems caused by population bottlenecks, wildlife disease, and invasive species, and compounded by climate change.
Our Approach
Revive & Restore will assemble a constellation of AI researchers, leading genome engineers, stem cell biologists, and conservationists from academic institutions and organizations worldwide. Each team will take on a seemingly intractable problem and develop a targeted approach to utilize AI’s potential to accelerate advances in stem cell science for conservation.You can view Program Manager Dr. Ashlee Hutchinson’s vision for universal reprogramming, enabled by evolution-encompassing machine learning here.
