Ben Lamm, the Dallas-based CEO of Colossal Biosciences, walked into a tech crowd this week with a jaw-dropping number and a bold fix. He said invasive species represent a $5.4 trillion global problem and argued that gene drives could be the way to beat them, repurposing the same genome-editing tools used in medicine to knock down feral pests without mass culling. His pitch landed on a high-profile podcast just as federal and state officials are scrambling to contain a separate pest threat that has put biological controls back in the policy spotlight.
Lamm’s figures and talking points were pulled together in a recent writeup of his appearance. He said U.S. losses alone top $500 billion a year and called gene drives “the only scalable” solution. As reported by 24/7 Wall St., Colossal’s pitch is to swap out poisons and mass culling for genetic interventions that quietly suppress populations over generations.
How Colossal Wants To Suppress Invaders
On the Moonshots podcast, Lamm sketched a strategy that sounds like science fiction but is very much in the works. Colossal wants to release invasive animals that have been altered so their offspring are overwhelmingly male or otherwise reproductively impaired. The idea is that populations would shrink over several generations instead of facing immediate, large-scale killing. Lamm told the hosts Colossal is building systems that are safer than what has ever been dispersed in the wild and insisted that we can roll it back. The full conversation, recorded at Abundance360, lives on the podcast’s episode page.
What Gene Drives Actually Do
Gene drives tilt the genetic playing field. Instead of a modified gene having a fifty-fifty shot of being passed on, a drive is designed so that a chosen change spreads through a population much faster than standard Mendelian inheritance would allow. That opens the door to suppression or modification plans that would be unrealistic at scale with conventional tools. Researchers have floated containment and countermeasure ideas such as split drives, daisy-chain systems and reversal constructs, although those designs add layers of complexity and uncertain behavior in real ecosystems. Nature Reviews Genetics lays out the technical toolbox along with the limits scientists still run into.
Science, Safety And Oversight
International authorities have been clear that engineered gene drives deserve special scrutiny. The organisms can persist, cross borders and trigger ecological shifts that are hard to predict or unwind. According to WHO, developers and regulators should use staged testing, rigorous risk assessments and sustained community engagement before anything is released outside the lab. Even strategies that are theoretically reversible may depend on complex follow-up releases or other large-scale interventions to work across a landscape.
A Near-Term Example In Texas
The policy debate is not theoretical for Texas. Federal and state officials recently turned to classic sterile-insect techniques to blunt a New World screwworm threat that could hit livestock hard. USDA opened a sterile-fly dispersal facility in South Texas, and the governor’s office issued a statewide disaster declaration to coordinate the response. Those moves are a reminder that governments still lean on established biological controls even as private companies talk up next-generation genetic tools.
Markets And The Business Case
Lamm also framed all of this as a market story. Analysts who tracked the episode flagged several public genome-editing platforms as potential beneficiaries if gene-drive applications manage to clear regulators. 24/7 Wall St. points to companies focused on refining delivery systems and editing tools that could underpin wider conservation uses.
Legal And Regulatory Hurdles
Governance will likely decide how far ideas like Lamm’s can move. The National Academies have urged phased trials, public engagement and international coordination before any environmental release of gene-drive organisms. In a 2016 report titled Gene Drives on the Horizon, the group laid out principles that policymakers and developers would need to meet, a demanding checklist in a space where science, ethics and law collide. Those constraints help explain why Colossal couples technical optimism with repeated safety assurances…