Warhound Raises $200 Million for Genetic Dog Project

Palmer Luckey has launched a new startup called Warhound to build genetically enhanced dogs for military service. The company announced it has raised $200 million from investors including Sequoia Capital.

Warhound states that its canines will be engineered to detect explosives and help protect troops. The startup is partnering with Colossal Biosciences to handle the cloning and gene-editing work.

The funding round provides the capital necessary to develop the genetic modifications required for these specific combat roles. The involvement of Colossal Biosciences brings established expertise in genetic manipulation to the project.

This development adds to a wave of biotech applications in recent weeks. Moderna and Merck reported that their mRNA cancer vaccine cut deaths by 42 percent in patients with melanoma. The same treatment also lowered the risk of cancer recurrence.

In another medical advance, researchers reported that a gene-editing tool called prime editing has reached its first human patient. The technique rewrites DNA in liver cells to address genetic defects.

On the cybersecurity front, experts noted that recent flaws in PHP are harder to exploit than initially feared. Although the vulnerabilities knocked websites offline around the world, no successful attacks have been disclosed. Volunteer Ondřej Surý patched the software, a contribution that developer Ian Landsman praised on social media.

Meanwhile, Google is paying customers to free up power for its data centers through a virtual power plant program. A separate report indicated that the company illegally felled 250,000 trees in Finland for a data center facility. In the tech world, a new issue of MIT Technology Review examines six technologies that have long been described as imminent but remain elusive.