The Los Angeles Project (LAP), a venture-backed biotech startup that’s been operating quietly for the past year, comes out of stealth today. Its pre-seed round was funded by 1517 and other undisclosed investors. Josie Zayner and Cathy Tie, the company’s co-founders, have been building a high-throughput gene-editing platform and knowledge database focused on the genetic modification of animal embryos. One of the company’s most exciting, and eccentric, objectives? “I want to build a unicorn,” Cathy told me. In Josie’s words, LAP is a “generational company creating a new lineage of biotech” and, hopefully, “a new lineage of life.”

The company, by constructing an automated system for genetically modifying animal embryos at scale, will master the science of manipulating cellular and genetic material, which Josie characterized as “alien technology.” Practically, this entails starting with small animals like cats and rabbits, training their systems on the resulting data, and eventually taking on more ambitious projects like xenomedicine (using biological materials from animals to treat human medical conditions) and, of course, the creation of the prized unicorn.

Fittingly, Josie Zayner and Cathy Tie are inured to hard problems and operating against the status quo. Josie is a biophysicist who earned her PhD from the University of Chicago and worked at NASA to engineer plastic-eating bacteria for Mars missions. She previously founded a company that sells DIY genetic engineering kits to amateurs, performed a full-body microbiome transplant documented by The New York Times, and famously injected herself with a CRISPR solution meant to modify a gene that controls muscle growth. She also created (and took) a DNA-based COVID vaccine on livestream in 2020 and gave herself temporary breasts with an experimental injection (later coming out as transgender in 2022).

Cathy, for her part, published her first immunology paper at 16, co-founded genetic-testing startup Ranomics at 18, became the youngest founder to raise venture capital in biotech, and was selected for the Thiel Fellowship program. By 22, she was a partner at Cervin Ventures, subsequently launching Locke Bio (“Shopify for Health”), and has been invited to join the board of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Association starting in 2026. An early instantiation of The Los Angeles Project was featured at last year’s Hereticon event in Miami, giving participants the ability to gene-edit frog embryos (trait options included glowing in the dark, doubling their size, and adding extra toes).

Josie, fully on-board with the aforementioned unicorn goal, explained to me that “if you can put antlers on a rabbit, you can make a unicorn, right?” While still hypothetical, the logic here is that the things we learn about genetic combinations in smaller animals with lower cycle times will be directly applicable to larger animals and other ambitious undertakings (e.g. unicorn making). In the pursuit of creating new species, however, she isn’t ignoring animals that already exist — she believes that granting advanced sentience to cows, birds, lizards, and other everyday creatures isn’t as ridiculous as it may seem. “We literally have the blueprint for intelligence,” Josie asserted, “it’s in our genes. It just requires somebody putting in the effort to figure this stuff out… animal intelligence is going to happen eventually.”

If the future of biotech looks like genetic experimentation, sentient animals, unicorns, and xenomedicine, where do you start? LAP’s answer: animal embryos. “One of the biggest problems in this space is gene delivery,” Cathy said. “You can have CRISPR, but if you can’t deliver it to the patient in a meaningful way without harming them, it’s like having electricity but no light bulb.” This lack of a benign delivery mechanism is, currently, largely the case for humans and animals. Working with a single-cell embryo solves this issue: with one injection, you can change the DNA of the organism, and that altered DNA will propagate as the embryo develops.

Another key reason why Josie and Cathy are starting with genetically modifying animal embryos has to do with data collection. If you have a bunch of single-celled rabbit embryos, and you deliver genetic changes to each one, you can observe how they develop over time. This allows you to track how genes correlate with the unique physical traits of the mature animals. You can then feed all this data into AI systems that will help you understand what different gene combinations do and what experiments you should run next.

Josie recommended that I think about this recursive learning process as a narrowing of potential options — she considers genomics progress “a search space problem” in which “the goal is just to reduce the search space [for a given trait] down.” If intelligence were embodied somewhere within some cohort of 10,000 genes, and you went through a long enough process of elimination, you might conclude, by Josie’s logic, that “these 100 genes seem like the smallest search space we can find. Throw all 100 genes into a fucking dog and just see what happens!” I laughed, to which Josie said, “I know, right?!”

That might seem radical, but audacity is necessary in this space. Biotech, and genomics in particular, has been stagnant over the last decade. CRISPR technology has fallen short of its promise. As Cathy put it to me, “Eight years ago, CRISPR was really hyped up in the cultural zeitgeist… fast forward to 2025, those companies all have not lived up to the hype.” This is one reason she co-founded LAP, which aims to produce tangible outcomes for the public. (And what could be more tangible than a literal, actual, unicorn?) Their unconventional view is that bold experimentation must precede understanding in genomics, and that timing is key: “I think the technology is a lot more mature… and I think there’s a general excitement in the zeitgeist,” Cathy explained.

The Los Angeles Project is a useful vehicle for such experimentation and engagement with the zeitgeist: Josie and Cathy want to pursue truly novel creations with a scientific rigor that isn’t kept behind closed doors. They both stressed the importance of getting the public to build its own intuition about gene editing, to get the world involved in imagining the future of biology. That is one of the beautiful aspects of LAP — traditional institutional science is characterized by bureaucratic red tape, and worse, a dire lack of imagination, but Josie and Cathy see another path.

Their dislike for the broad paywalling of knowledge in the form of scientific journals was apparent, something that in part powers their dedication to transparency and cultural participation in the development of genetic technology. LAP hopes to usher in a future antithetical to the ‘paywalling’ ideology, where many more people are asking their own ethical, existential, methodological, philosophical, and even religious questions about genetics. This attitude of curiosity and creative expression is the contextual agar, if you will allow me the low-level science metaphor, from which LAP stems and in which it thrives.

One of the most significant challenges in LAP’s roadmap from animal embryos to unicorns and xenomedicine is the difference in species’ gestation periods. Rabbits, for example, have a gestation period of roughly 30 days. Cats and dogs? About double that: 60 days. Pigs come in at 115 days, cows at 280, and horses at nearly a year. This is one of the reasons why LAP’s go-to-market strategy is focused on animals at the shorter end of this spectrum, like fluorescent rabbits and true hypoallergenic cats. Already, in under a year, the company has successfully gene-edited embryos of mice, hamsters, cows, frogs, fish, and axolotls, managing to multi-target three genes simultaneously (thus far) with CRISPR. They have “built and tested first-of-its-kind robotic automation of embryo editing” and pioneered unprecedented “techniques in chemical transfection and electroporation of embryos” (basically, complementary methods to get DNA into cells).

Rabbits are also particularly interesting because they’re both pets and agricultural animals. (There are roughly five thousand rabbit farms operating in the United States today, the primary products of which are meat and fertilizer.) Genetic modifications have the potential to penetrate both markets and start generating early revenue for LAP. The prospect of true hypoallergenic cats and dogs is even more straightforward in terms of market appeal — as a personal severe cat-allergy-sufferer, I am one of the many who could personally benefit from such an innovation.

These entry-level products are necessary for two key reasons. First, Josie and Cathy feel that an appropriate cultural introduction of gene-editing technology is a critical step, and second, everything they want to do after that — to xenomedicine and beyond — is increasingly capital-intensive. In order to secure the capital necessary for larger animals with longer gestation periods, LAP needs to change the narrative around commercial gene editing. This is, in fact, one of the primary reasons they’re basing the company out of Los Angeles (with a sister site in Austin, Texas) and including the city in its name — Josie and Cathy see LA as a major hub of and gateway to the greater public conscience and cultural zeitgeist. “Los Angeles is a cultural epicenter of the world, if not the cultural epicenter right now,” Josie told me, contending that “if you’re going to change the way life on Earth is, it’s got to have cultural influence and significance along with everything else.” Their goal is to get early creations into “the hands of people who can influence culture around the idea of genetic engineering.”

Josie had a couple interesting examples of this. “You can have a fluorescent bunny rabbit on a fashion runway… Beyoncé would hold a fluorescent cat for a photo… So it’s thinking about how the culture will respond.” When I asked her why the cultural element was so important, she said that “number one, we’re trying to sell a product to the public that nobody has ever purchased before,” citing the possible exception of GloFish before tangentially explaining the relative non-snugglability and impersonal nature of pet fish. “It’ll be a completely new market, so I feel like you have to be way more thoughtful and strategic about it,” she said, noting that some “people are afraid of this technology.” Cathy echoed these sentiments. “What Josie and I are trying to do with LAP is have the public reimagine what this technology can be used for. And yes, at first it’s going to sound a little ridiculous… we’re going to make glow-in-the-dark bunnies... It’s a small step in a massive journey.”

Now, with this understanding, let’s return to the longer-term goal of creating the world’s first unicorn. What makes working with larger animals like horses so expensive? If each embryo takes almost a year to go from single cell to live animal, that’s not only a time commitment, but an ongoing care commitment. Pregnant horses need food, stables, caretakers — everything a typical horse needs in captivity. “Even just the animals we’re working with now — rabbits — it’s a lot, it’s an animal,” Josie told me. “It’s a living thing. It takes up space. It’s not like a software company where you can just run it remotely or something.”

Logistics aside, here’s how LAP will create a unicorn: identify genes associated with horns, put them into embryos, leverage computer vision to select the best ones, automate the implantation of these embryos into an artificial womb machine, oversee their growth and development, then iteratively repeat all of this until they get a unicorn. In other words, whittle down the genetic “search space” and, in the process, become fluent in the “alien technology” of cells and life. The LAP, to create their unicorn, must run enough real-life simulations, powered by educated guesses and the learnings from previous failures, to start constructing knowledge in a space that is largely untouched. And yes, the unicorn will be awesome in and of itself, but what it will really represent is a successful process of discovery. “The ultimate goal here is really to have mastery over gene-editing technology to create better products for humans and society in different sectors, whether it be pharmaceuticals or agriculture or pets… there’s so many different areas where you’re interacting with biology.”

The longer-term payoff? Seemingly limitless. Let’s again step into the future: xenotransplantation. Growing human-implantable organs inside gene-edited pigs could provide kidneys and hearts for everyone who needs them. No more reliance on donor organs — we will be able to bypass humans entirely. The same general concept applies to blood transfusion: modified pigs could be our primary blood donors, no blood drives required. Revivicor, a company I learned about from Josie and Cathy, is already starting this work: in late 2024, one of their gene-edited pig kidneys was placed into a 53-year-old woman from Alabama who needed a transplant. Towana Looney, the woman in question, is still alive, making her the only person in the world living with a pig organ. Apparently, she’s doing incredibly well, and has set the record for the longest survival period post xenotransplant (no previous xenotransplant recipient has survived beyond two months). As this work continues, and as initiatives like The Los Angeles Project master gene editing, the fabric of biological reality will continue to change.

This kind of fluency in genetic technology would really be limited in application only by imagination and funding. Dominion, a Pirate Wires piece by Solana about using gene drives to eradicate invasive Burmese pythons from the Everglades, makes this obvious. We will just be able to do things to reinvent nature whenever it makes sense. Making pythons selectively self-destruct? Done. Eliminating malaria-carrying mosquitoes? Easy. Also mentioned in the piece are the invasive lionfish populations of the Caribbean and Western Atlantic. If LAP is successful, all sorts of approaches could be taken: putting advantageous genes in competing fish, putting disadvantageous genes in newly introduced lionfish, or coming up with some third option entirely. A greater understanding of how to precisely and effectively gene-edit living organisms would also prevent problems like those encountered by a team that tried to genetically engineer hornless cattle. In that case, FDA scientists discovered that antibiotic-resistant bacterial genes were inadvertently added to the cows (this is known as an “off-target effect”). LAP’s iterative data collection process and bold experimentation will decrease the risk of such unintended consequences.

The first thing Josie told me about LAP was that it’s “a company whose goal is to get the Pope to write a report on the meaning of life.” The quip was both playful and, I felt, emblematic of some truth about herself and the company. Josie and Cathy have no shortage of ideas that would strike most people, myself included, as “unconventional,” to say the least. There is something essential about biology, with its fundamental ties to the origin and persistence of life, which is both mundane and sacred. As such, some find the idea of tampering with genetic instructions to be drenched in hubris — blasphemous, even.

But to change life itself, you have to break taboos and shape public perception. You have to be a live player in the culture and push the limits of scientific inquiry. The second thing that Josie Zayner said to me about The Los Angeles Project, immediately after her Pope comment, was the following: “I think, to me, biology is something that is engineerable and programmable and fuckable-with. I don’t see nature as sacred. I see it as a sandbox that we can play around in. And The Los Angeles Project is a company that wants to play around in that sandbox and build better life.”

Biology is messy and individual and tied up in all sorts of cultural tropes. What LAP is trying to do will contend directly with our ideas about the nature of life, bodily autonomy, the ethics of working with animals, and so much more. It will force us to ask fundamental questions about our existence, about what rights we have or don’t have to change the world around us. First, minor modifications to animal embryos, next, the creation of new species like the unicorn, and beyond, some limitless series of biological reinventions. Josie and Cathy are, for their part, asking questions about who gets to create new forms of life — and posing their own: why shouldn’t it be them, and all of us together?

As Josie told me, we now “have these tools that kind of make us gods. We can build life and engineer life even though we cannot create it from scratch.” This, to me, describes a harnessing of the breath of life — a mastery over and leveraging of that initial spark, from that first cell, however you think it came into being. “Maybe we kind of are gods,” Josie said, and “maybe we should just embrace this.” I want to end with a quote from LAP’s website, which reads as follows: “The Los Angeles Project is dedicated to ensuring the power of Gods remains in the hands of the people and for the betterment of our planet.” I’m not sure what to think about all of this yet, or what the Pope will have to say about a real, living unicorn, but I do certainly look forward to his treatise on what it means about life itself. Godspeed.

— G. B. Rango

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Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity without altering the original meaning or intent.