Private company Altos Labs is reportedly backed by Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner. Altos Labs utilizes biological reprogramming technology to rejuvenate cells in the lab on a mission to prolong human life.
Discovering the elixir of life to look and feel young forever is a tale as old as time. If Altos Labs can make any breakthrough in this regard, its potential worth is limitless.
It is a relative newcomer, only incorporating in the US and UK earlier in 2021. But its ambitions are grand, and backers are prominent.
Who wants to live forever?
MIT Technology Review recently unveiled Altos Labs as an ambitious new anti-aging company. It also confirmed that Yuri Milner and his wife have invested in Altos Labs through a foundation.
Milner is a Russian-Israeli physicist who made his fortune from investments in Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR).
The rumor that Bezos is also a backer has added strength to the story, although Altos Labs have not verified this.
Bezos, the world’s richest man, has a net worth of approximately $200bn. Meanwhile, Milner is worth around $4.8bn.
The company plans to open several research centers worldwide, including the US, UK, and Japan.
Photographer: Elizeu Dias | Source: Unsplash
Top recruits
Altos is understood to have hired a selection of top scientists, including Manuel Serrano and Juan Carlos Izpisua.
Izpisua is known for injecting stem cells into monkey embryos to grow organs for transplant – the world’s first human-monkey hybrid.
It’s believed these top scientists are being lured with salaries worth millions of dollars, along with a big budget and free reign to discover rejuvenation.
In 2017, Serrano was quoted as saying:
“I imagine that if it can be done in a mouse it can be done in humans. It will be more difficult, but I think there will be anti-aging therapies in the relatively near future, in 10, 20 or 30 years. I doubt that will make us immortal, but we’re heading in that direction.”
Some other prominent recruits include Shinya Yamanaka and Wolf Reik.
Japanese Nobel Prize winner, Shinya Yamanaka, discovered that mature cells can be converted to stem cells. Wolf Reik is a German molecular biologist who resigned as director of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK.
Meanwhile, the Entrepreneur and ex-Director of the National Cancer Institute, Richard Klausner, is CEO of Altos Labs.
Funded and raring to go
Altos Labs has reportedly raised at least $270m in funding. But Altos is not alone in its quest to reverse aging.
Google’s Larry Page founded Calico Labs in 2013, another anti-aging business attempting to make the ultimate scientific discovery. So far, it’s a work in progress.
Other competitors include AgeX Therapeutics, Life Biosciences, Turn Biotechnologies, and Shift Bioscience.