“If we can create organs of endangered animals, we can understand how those organs work and how to protect them from infection,” says Miho Murayama, director of the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University. “That would be very useful, because we can’t experiment on them like we do mice.”

Scientists working in Kazakhstan are still struggling to understand why 200,000 saiga antelopes – 60% of the global population – suddenly dropped dead from a bacterial infection in 2015, while researchers in Tasmania have been working for years to devise life-saving treatments for a gruesome, contagious face cancer that is threatening the survival of Tasmanian devils. Gorillas are another prime example: they are notoriously prone to heart attacks – but no one knows why, and no one has been able to provide a fix. “If we can mimic gorilla heart attacks inside the body on a chip system, we can identify what kinds of drug and treatments will help them,” Kamei says. “This kind of testing would be beneficial not only for endangered animals, but also for pets and livestock.”

Ryder adds that beyond chips, iPS cells open up a seemingly endless array of possibilities for species conservation. “If genetic diversity can be banked and restored by turning cells into animals or by using cellularly-based technologies to restore genetic variation, then there’s less risk of extinction,” he says. “It’s amazing to be at a place where we can investigate the possibilities of this kind of technology.”

Ryder is one of the leads on the most well-known of such projects: an international effort to save the northern white rhino – a subspecies of white rhino that is now reduced to just two living individuals – by using frozen tissue samples of former individuals to create iPS cells. The iPS cells would, in turn, be made into egg and sperm cells to create viable, genetically diverse embryos to be implanted in surrogate southern white rhino mothers. While an ambitious start, Ryder points out that this is now the only hope for saving the subspecies from extinction. And regardless of the project’s success, it will likely pave the way for similar species-saving efforts in the future.