Conservation and biomedical research have long been siloed. Conservationists focus on biodiversity metrics and habitat services; medical researchers focus on laboratory assays and clinical translation. Few structures exist for collaboration, and funding streams are separated by discipline.

 

Additionally, rewilding itself is a relatively new movement—most large-scale projects are less than two decades old—so the idea that restored ecosystems might serve as drug-discovery reservoirs has only recently become possible to test.

 

Finally, the cost and complexity of high-throughput microbial assays used to be prohibitive. Today, the availability of affordable culture-based screens and small-scale sequencing makes this project both timely and feasible.  ​