Eriona Hysolli is the Head of Biological Sciences at Colossal Biosciences, a breakthrough biosciences and genetic engineering company focused on developing radical new technologies to advance the fields of de-extinction, species preservation and human healthcare through genomics. In January 2023, the company secured an oversubscribed $150M Series B financing led by the United States Innovative Technology Fund with participation from Bob Nelsen, Jazz Ventures among others, bringing total funding to $225M.

Eriona was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the George Church lab at Harvard Medical School from 2015 – 2021, where she focused on developing and optimizing novel genetic tools for multiplex mammalian genome engineering including mammoth de-extinction and building a virus-resistance human cell line. Her authored publications include characterizing different populations of human induced pluripotent stem cells arising during reprogramming, setting up a human cell-bacteria co-culture model to study how biocontainment can be exploited for probiotic development, and multiplex editing of TAG to TAA codons genome-wide in human cells.

We are excited to hear her story, the founding of Colossal, and what it means for humanity and the environment to bring back the wooly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and more recently announced, the Dodo bird.