The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, a billionaire specializing in high-tech projects, partnered to fund research at Altos Labs, a biotech startup looking for ways to reverse aging, reported MIT Technology Review.
The “startup” is focused on studying cell reprogramming, which consists of adding special proteins to a cell to tell it to return to a state similar to that of a stem cell.
The author of these studies is Shinya Yamanaka, a 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine, who will be an unpaid senior scientist and chair of the company’s scientific advisory board, sources close to the project revealed.
Altos Labs was founded in the United States earlier this year and has so far raised at least $270 million .
In addition to Bezos and Milner, the company has the financial support of various personalities from the technology sector and venture capitalists.
Among other specialists who would join the project is Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist from the Salk Institute (California), author of research mixing human and monkey embryos and who also predicted that there is a way to prolong human life so less 50 years
Altos Labs also relies on the services of Steve Horvath, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and developer of a “biological clock” that can accurately measure human aging.
In 2016 Belmonte tested protein reprogramming, invented by Yamanaka, in live mice. As a result, it achieved signs of age reversal that could demonstrate the viability of the technology. “Although there are many obstacles to overcome, the project has enormous potential, ” Yamanaka stressed.
The new company, incorporated in the US and UK, will establish several institutes in places like the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large pool of university scientists at attractive salaries, and they promise they can conduct unfettered research on how cells age and how to reverse that process.