The world is undeniably in the throes of a climate crisis which is driving an acceleration in global animal extinction events. The alarming rate of species addition to the endangered list means that numerous species will ultimately find themselves entered onto the critically endangered list followed by functional extinction. Unfortunately, the available set of species recovery tools, based in existing ART, cloning and surrogate birth techniques, are currently incapable of rescuing any functionally extinct species. To date there has been very little success in recovering even critically endangered species. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop new and complementary tools and techniques capable of rescuing a broad range of species from the very edge of extinction.
The ExoUterus project is an ongoing attempt to fill an important gap in our species recovery capability. That gap, stated as a question, is: what can you do when there are no or too few females of a species and no suitable surrogates available to live birth healthy animals? Our proposed solution to this dilemma is gestation within an artificial womb. As such we are developing a functionally modular, exogenous marsupial biosynthetic uterus with the goal of facilitating gestation from zygote to parturition. I will discuss the concept and the underpinning reasoning behind design choices as well as the potential for a broad lateral application across species.
State-of-the-art species recovery methods have no viable answers for the ever-increasing number of critically endangered species. The successful development of a functional artificial uterus is an essential part of the solution to saving these species.