#7 The story behind Altos Labs
The billionaire-backed longevity giant seeking the fountain of youth
The Agenda 👇
News bulletin 📰
The story behind Altos Labs
Recent funding in longevity 💰
Upcoming events 📅
Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
1/ News bulletin 📰
🔬 Longevity sirtuin clinical trial teases promising results - SIRT6 reactivation in ageing tissues may help delay the process of ageing through improving Base Excision Repair (BER)
💯 Crypto-backed study seeks 10,000 centenarians - Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial aims to create a template for trials of age targeting therapies
🧬 Loss of male sex chromosome leads to shortened longevity for men - loss of Y chromosome in the blood showed greater risk of cardiac pathology
🐁 Ghrelin Is Associated with Worse Muscle Aging in Mice - deleterious effects on the metabolism of ageing muscle thought to be at least partially mediated by myokine irisin
🍲 Caloric Restriction Improves Immune System Function - results suggest that CR suppresses age-associated immunosenescence
2/ The story behind Altos Labs
The saying goes that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young. In October 2020, during the height on the COVID-19 pandemic, an eclectic group of elite scientists and billionaires descended on Yuri Milner’s super-mansion in the Los Altos Hills above Palo Alto, to discuss how biotechnology might be used to make people younger. Milner is a Russian-born billionaire who made his fortune on Facebook and Mail.ru and created the glittery Breakthrough Prizes, $3m awards given each year to outstanding physicists, biologists, and mathematicians.
That meeting subsequently led to the formation of an ambitious longevity firm called Altos Labs. Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies and ultimately prolonging human life. This effort took shape under the direction of Richard Klausner, the one-time chief of the National Cancer Institute and now an entrepreneur. Klausner, who previously helped found companies such as Juno Therapeutics and cancer-test company Grail, is known for organising large, and lucrative, financial bets on new biotechnologies.
The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK in 2021, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK, and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with sports star sized salaries with the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how we might reverse that process.
Those briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner and his wife Julia who have invested through their foundation. Bezos is said to have a long-standing interest in longevity research and has previously invested in an anti-aging company called Unity Biotechnology.
Altos has drawn comparisons to Calico Labs, a longevity company announced in 2013 by Google co-founder, Larry Page. Much like Altos, Calico hired top-tier scientists and offered them generous budgets, however it’s questionable as to whether the Google spinout has made much progress. Calico has also started a lab whose focus is reprogramming; it published its first preprint on the topic last year.
Among the scientists who have joined Altos include Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, who drew attention in for research mixing human and monkey embryos. Also joining is Steve Horvath, a UCLA professor and developer of a “Horvath Clock” that can measure human biological age. Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, chairs the company’s scientific advisory board.
Following the now famous meeting at his home, a non-profit called the Milky Way Research Foundation sponsored by Milner awarded three-year grants of $1 million a year, to several longevity researchers. The proposals were reviewed by an advisory board including Altos’ Yamanaka and Jennifer Doudna, who shared a Breakthrough Prize in 2015 and later a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her co-discovery of CRISPR genome editing.
Altos has not made any official announcements yet, but has raised at least $3.27B, according to PitchBook, the company data aggregator. The group is well placed to finance a suite of longevity research programmes across the domain. Despite the high-profile investors, A-list scientists, and incredibly deep pockets, very little is known about what Altos is building and how much progress has already been achieved. One thing we can be sure of however, is that this is certainly a company to watch.
3/ Recent funding in longevity 💰
Syapse raises $68m strategic investment from Ally Bridge Group and Northpond Ventures
Deep Lens raises $14 million to improve clinical trial recruitment with AI
4/ Upcoming events 📅
🌐 The Fifth Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference takes place virtually on August 11-14, 2022, where you’ll be able to hear the latest developments from the leaders of rejuvenation biotechnology research and investment.
🇩🇪 The Rejuvenation Startup Summit returns this year in Berlin, Germany on October 14-15. This is a vibrant networking event that brings together startups and members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem, all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.
🇮🇪 The Longevity Summit Dublin takes place this year on 18th-20th of September in Ireland! Conference will feature some of the world’s renowned longevity experts like George Church (Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School), Aubrey de Grey (Co-Founder, SENS Research Foundation), Evelyne Yehudit Bischof (Associate professor, internal medicine specialist, Longevity physician at Human Longevity Inc.), Jim Mellon (Chairman & Co-Founder Juvenescense ; Global Investor ), Greg Grinberg (Actualfood Founder & CEO), Phil Newman (Founder, First Longevity, Editor-in–Chief Longevity.Technology), and many more.
5/ Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
Cellino // Lab Manager // Cambridge, MA
Calico Labs // Senior Data Scientist - Systems Genetics // South San Francisco, CA
Altos Labs // US general interest - UK general interest // US - UK
NewLimit // Data Scientist, Computational Biology // San Francisco, Seattle, Remote
Retro.bio // Pharma Project Manager // Redwood City, CA