Revive & Restore

Advanced coral toolkit: now in its fifth year, this program 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.

Black-footed ferret recovery: 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 blackfooted 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 speciesdramatically 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.

In december 2024, revive & restore announced the new applied stem cell conservation fund and will launch a world-first rfp in early 2025, aiming to achieve breakthrough advances in universal reprogramming, enabling reproduction, and mitigating wildlife disease. Biotech for climate resilience is an emerging program area with plans to launch an rfp later in 2025.