Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever

muh paywall fuck'em: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever

Funders of a deep-pocketed new "rejuvenation" startup are said to include Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner.

by Antonio Regaladoarchive page


September 4, 2021

ALAMY, GETTY (BEZOS)

Last October, a large group of scientists made their way to Yuri Milner’s super-mansion in the Los Altos Hills above Palo Alto. They were tested for covid-19 and wore masks as they assembled in a theater on the property for a two-day scientific conference. Others joined by teleconference. The topic: how biotechnology might be used to make people younger.

Milner is a Russian-born billionaire who made a fortune on Facebook and Mail.ru and previously started the glitzy black-tie Breakthrough Prizes, $3 million awards given each year to outstanding physicists, biologists, and mathematicians. But Milner’s enthusiasm for science was taking a provocative and specific new direction. As the scientific sessions progressed, experts took the stage to describe radical attempts at “rejuvenating” animals.

That meeting has now led to the formation of an ambitious new anti-aging company called Altos Labs, according to people familiar with the plans. 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, ultimately prolonging human life.

The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, 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 lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process.

Some people briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in July and weeks later risked his life by jumping into a rocket capsule to reach outer space. Technology Review confirmed that Milner and his wife Julia have invested in Altos through a foundation.

>>14746862

moar it seems…

Has this scientist finally found the fountain of youth?

Editing the epigenome, which turns our genes on and off, could be the “elixir of life.”

Altos is certain to draw comparisons to Calico Labs, a longevity company announced in 2013 by Google co-founder, Larry Page. Calico also hired elite scientific figures and gave them generous budgets, although it’s been questioned 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 this year.

Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Salk declined to comment.

Also joining is Steve Horvath, a UCLA professor and developer of a “biological clock” that can accurately measure human aging. Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, will be an unpaid senior scientist and will chair the company’s scientific advisory board.

Yamanaka’s breakthrough discovery was that with the addition of just four proteins, now known as Yamanaka factors, cells can be instructed to revert to a primitive state with the properties of embryonic stem cells. By 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte’s lab had applied these factors to entire living mice, achieving signs of age reversal and leading him to term reprogramming a potential “elixir of life.”

The results of such mouse experiments, while tantalizing, were also frightening. Depending on how much reprogramming occurred, some mice developed ugly embryonic tumors called teratomas, even as others showed signs their tissues had become younger.

“Although there are many hurdles to overcome, there is huge potential,” Yamanaka said in an email, in which he confirmed his role in Altos.

Mid-life crisis?

It’s been said that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young. That paradox is one that people like Milner, age 59, and Bezos, who is 57 years old, may feel acutely. Forbes currently ranks Bezos as the world’s richest person, with a net worth of around $200 billion. Milner’s wealth is estimated at $4.8 billion.

Bezos Expeditions, the investment office of Amazon’s founder, did not reply to an email seeking comment.

People familiar with the formation of Altos say that initially Milner’s interest in reprogramming was philanthropic. After the 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 considered by an advisory board including Yamanaka and Jennifer Doudna, who shared a Breakthrough Prize in 2015 and later a Nobel in 2020 for her co-discovery of CRISPR genome editing.

…

>>14746873

wow, still moar….

Google’s Long, Strange Life-Span Trip

Why does a mole rat live 30 years but a mouse only three? With $1.5 billion in the bank, Google’s anti-aging spinout Calico is rich enough to find out.

Ocampo also worries that there is too much money, and too many companies, trying to get into the research area. “I think it’s moving too fast. I don’t know if we should have five to eight reprogramming companies —it looks too quick,” he says. “How many papers have there even been in in vivo reprogramming? It’s the same as the number of companies.”

On the other hand, the technique has an indisputable, repeatable, effect in laboratory experiments when applied to individual cells. “You can take a cell from an 80-year old  and, in vitro, reverse the age by 40 years. There is no other technology that can do that,” says Ocampo.

What’s more, reprogramming is also recognized as a key process that occurs naturally when a fertilized egg turns into an embryo and, nine months later, leads to a fresh-faced baby. Somehow, the DNA of the parents is scrubbed, renewed, and restarted. After trillions of baby animals have been born over a billion years, Ocampo thinks it’s safe to say that “reprogramming is one of the experiments that has been reproduced the most.”

Altos will also be working with a related technology for measuring the relative age of a cell, or a person. That biological-clock technique, pioneered by Horvath, involves measuring the “epigenetic” marks on genes. These molecular features turn genes on and off, but their pattern becomes disorganized as people age. Such a biomarker of aging would be an important way to measure the effect of any longevity or age-reversal drug that is developed. It’s difficult to run a medical study that demonstrates life extension, since it would take too long, but a biomarker could be employed instead.

There is also a strong scientific connection between aging clocks and reprogramming, since reprogramming appears to work by remodeling the epigenetic marks in a cell’s genome to an immature or naive state. That means Altos will be working at the leading edge of both causing and measuring rejuvenation.

Young and rich

Bezos is said to have a fairly long-standing interest in longevity research, and he previously invested in an anti-aging company called Unity Biotechnology. Rumors of the billionaire making a seismic-sized splash into the field have swirled for months.

While Technology Review could not confirm his stake in Altos, what’s sure is that getting older is on his mind. In his final letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos included a quote ruminating on death and decay that he’d found in a book by the biologist Richard Dawkins: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at…If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Bezos meant that nations, companies, and individuals have to fight to remain distinct, original and unique. Rewinding the clock to your younger days could be one way to do that.

Dasting Experiments in Spin at MIT Tech Review (anti-HCQ smears)

Pandemic Technology Project

This tech millionaire went from covid trial funder to misinformation superspreader

After boosting unproven covid drugs and campaigning against vaccines, Steve Kirsch was abandoned by his team of scientific advisers—and left out of a job.

by Cat Ferguson October 5, 2021

In the early days of the pandemic, as billions of dollars poured into the hunt for novel treatments and vaccines, veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch did what he’s always done: He went looking for an underdog.

Since making a fortune as the founder of Infoseek, an early search engine that was the Google of its day, Kirsch has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting humanity’s biggest threats. He prefers iconoclastic approaches, whether by directly funding asteroid detection or advocating for nuclear power to combat global warming.

By March 2020, he’d settled on the idea of searching for covid treatments in the pre-existing pharmacopeia. The premise made sense: Most experts were predicting vaccines would take years, while finding helpful drugs with known safety profiles could shortcut the approval process….

Kirsch, despite having direct access to the actual trial runner, eventually became convinced a “correct” interpretation of the data would show that hydroxychloroquine worked. …

[and that, of course, is where he. went off the reservation…]

moar: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/

>>14746898

o dear, what a coincidence

wonder who's long

>>14746888

Trips of Infinite Justice

>>14746916

>‘politicized’ order would cause him to lose up to 10% of workforce

but that's precisely what they want, isn't it?

>>14746927

what species is that bird?

>>14746935

>>14746943

hope it's this one

>>14746952

don't need no stinkin' brave new world