A new biotechnology start-up wants to use gene-editing technology, cloning and advanced military technology to create a new dog optimized for combat. But does the science to back up its claims exist? And if so, can the company possibly deliver on the idea?
The start-up, called Warhound, is the brainchild of Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Anduril Industries’ Palmer Luckey. Warhound intends to clone and genetically modify military service dogs to produce larger, more efficient working dogs for use in conflict zones and policing. Experts say that the science the company proposes is possible—but that it is also prone to error, inefficiencies and a slew of ethical concerns.
Warhound has already biobanked the genetic material from a group of elite service dogs, Lamm says, including breeds such as Belgian Malinois and shepherds. Warhound’s scientists intend to clone the cells of those dogs and edit the cloned embryos to produce new puppies. They’re expecting the first litters in early 2027, Lamm says.
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Cloning dogs is not a new science. Research has shown that cloning service dogs produces puppies that have many of the same desirable traits. But the process can be harmful, says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University. The rate of successful live offspring remains low among the cloned dogs, and the process can put the surrogate mother in danger.
“It is by no means a perfect science, and by that, I mean it’s still a fairly inefficient process,” Moses says. “It requires a lot of dogs to have invasive things done to them and to be killed in order to produce one cloned puppy.”
Warhound intends to make several genetic modifications in its cloned embryos to make the dogs healthier, stronger and better workers. First, the company hopes to modify the dogs to reduce the risk of health conditions such as hip disease, vision loss and cancer predisposition—and, eventually, to optimize ideal traits for military dogs.
“The standard is that no dog enters service carrying a genetic marker known to cause a common career-ending condition,” Lamm says. “From there, we are working on edits specifically targeting additional longevity and health, as well as performance factors.”
Both scientists and private companies have genetically edited dogs before, and the research can “accelerate really fast because genomics in dog breeds already has a lot of data,” says Ben Novak, chief scientist at Revive and Restore, who works on wildlife cloning for conservation. Researchers have edited dogs to tweak genes for hip dysplasia, make them hypoallergenic and treat muscle disease, although the long-term health effects of these changes remain unclear.
But optimizing traits at scale and across service dogs could take time—and leave room for unintended consequences, Novak adds.
“It can be hard to figure out exactly what genetic element is creating a trait,” he says, “and some traits can be the combinations of hundreds or thousands of mutations across genes.”
Colossal Biosciences, which has partial ownership of Warhound and is providing much of the science, is no stranger to genetic engineering: last year the firm cloned and edited a gray wolf to create an animal that was genetically similar to the extinct dire wolf. The process for Warhound will look similar, Lamm says, but with modern dogs.
In its launch announcement, Warhound said it had raised $200 million in funding. Novak says that from a commercial perspective, the concept makes sense.
“For a biotech company, it is certainly a slam dunk idea: guaranteed military contracts, which is the most funded aspect of U.S. government science, with an actual potential to improve a sector of military use that I think everyone can agree is important.”
But from a bioethics standpoint, Moses says, involving man’s best friend in biotechnology can quickly become fraught.
“I’ve had lots of conversations about what Colossal Biosciences is doing and has done. But when you start messing around with dogs, people feel very differently,” Moses says.
Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine and a pioneer of cloning research, says the ethics and technique of Warhound’s premise are far from “black or white.”
“I think such goals are definitely achievable from a scientific perspective. But then again, it’s highly unlikely it could be done without many, many failures and defects,” he says.