Silicon Valley Startup, Altos Labs Attracts Funds From Billionaires To Chase Immortality

For ages, scientists around the world labored to find a cure for aging with little luck. But, thanks to modern medicine, the average lifespan has more than doubled in the last two hundred years. So, armed with the knowledge gained from groundbreaking tech and biotech breakthroughs, attaining immortality is no more a preposterous idea.

In 2013, Calico Labs, a Silicon Valley startup heavily backed by Google, garnered immense funding from billionaires. Without revealing many details, the founders vaguely announced that their mission is to understand aging and find ways to delay it.

“It takes 10 or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Health care is certainly one of those areas,” said Larry Page, the then CEO of Google, in an interview with the TIME magazine. “We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now, we have those things done.”

Today, longevity research is an actively growing market, and recently, many rejuvenation biotechnology startups have cropped up, captivating big investors in the process. Some notable companies include BioAge, Alkahest, BioViva, AgeX Therapeutics, and Insilico Medicine.

Billionaire Funded Rejuvenation Startup

At this juncture, the MIT Technology Review reports that another Silicon Valley startup, Altos Labs, has reportedly raised US$ 270 million with backing from top investors to fund its anti-aging research in a similar fashion. The company, which incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, has attracted top billionaires, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner.

Altos intends to develop biological reprogramming technology to rejuvenate cells in the lab and revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life. Making money is not Alto’s immediate goal. Instead, it will try to understand cell rejuvenation and develop a safe technology to rejuvenate animals using ordinary drugs rather than genetic engineering.

Altos is offering million-dollar annual salaries to lure academic talents for its several institutes it plans to establish in the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK, and Japan to develop anti-aging technologies for cell rejuvenation. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute, Steve Horvath from UCLA, Peter Walter from UCSF, Wolf Reik from the Babraham Institute, UK, and Manuel Serrano of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Spain are some of its high profile hires.

Nobel Prize Winner as Advisor

Besides, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, will join Altos as an unpaid senior scientist and will chair the company’s scientific advisory board.

Dr. Yamanaka, a pioneer of the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, demonstrated that the addition of four specific proteins, Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc, collectively known as Yamanaka factors, can convert somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells. In 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte’s lab showed that the addition of these factors in a mouse model of premature aging ameliorated cellular and physiological hallmarks of aging and prolonged lifespan. However, the mice also developed cancer and died within three to four days.

“Although there are many hurdles to overcome, there is huge potential,” Yamanaka told MIT Technology Review.

Author

Rajaneesh K. Gopinath