What do Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison have in common with Sand Altman? The founder of Amazon, one of the brains of PayPal in its beginnings and the former CEO of Oracle, like the head honcho of OpenAI, are hell-bent on reduce human aging. And, to try to achieve it, they have invested millions of dollars of their fortunes.
Altman, who until recently went unnoticed in the tech world and preferred to keep a low profile, has just entered the club of the most talked-about characters this year. A benefit that he has achieved thanks to the prominent advances in artificial intelligence of the company he runs, and high-level partnerships, such as Microsoft.
The successful entrepreneur, who already rubs shoulders with the elite of this industry, is also interested in promoting scientific projects that help humans achieve greater longevity. His first bet in this field, according to MIT Technology Review, already has number and name. We are talking about 180 million dollars destined for Retro Biosciences.
Sandman’s check, the foundations of Retro Biosciences
Retro Biosciences biotechnology is a biotechnology startup started with a financing of 180 million dollars, a key investment to pursue its mission of “increasing healthy human life expectancy by ten years”. That check came from a single person, as we can see and we just found out, that person was Altman.
The company, founded by Joe Betts-LaCroix, Sheng Ding and Matt Buckley, has already begun to take its first steps. The first step has been build a lab from scratch in San Francisco and start recruiting bright minds interested in working on their scientific research. One of them has been that of Alejandro Ocampo, a scientist at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, dedicated to rejuvenating mice for years.
Joe Betts-LaCroix, CEO of Retro Biosciences
In fact, Altman had shown interest in the past in research that consisted of uniting old mice and young mice so that they shared their circulatory system. One of the pillars of Retro Biosciences, as they explain on their website, is to approach aging from the “plasma-inspired therapy” perspective. In this sense, they hope to start clinical trials in two years.
Retro Biosciences
The other revolves around cell reprogramming techniques. Betts-LaCroix has focused on T cells, an elementary part of the immune system that is formed from stem cells in the bone marrow. The idea is to extract them, “rejuvenate” them in the laboratory and then return them to the patient. But although this may be promising, from the startup they indicate that they will need years of work to achieve notable advances.
Unlike other companies also focused on human rejuvenation, Retro Biosciences aims for long-term goals. Betts-LaCroix, his competition is doing “quick and easy” experiments, with the aim of demonstrating results in the short term. If they follow that path, they believe, they will not get very far, so they must choose another if they want to progress.
Images: Montage Microsoft + dc studio | Retro Biosciences
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