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When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span. It had set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping containers to the concrete floor to quickly make lab space for the scientists who had been enticed to join the company.

Retro said that it would “prize speed” and “tighten feedback loops” as part of an “aggressive mission” to stall aging, or even reverse it. But it was vague about where its money had come from. At the time, it was a “mysterious startup,” according to press reports, “whose investors remain anonymous.”

Now MIT Technology Review can reveal that the entire sum was put up by Sam Altman, the 37-year-old startup guru and investor who is CEO of OpenAI.

https://retro.bio

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http://healthextension.co/about/

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#2

Retro Biosciences, backed by Sam Altman, is raising $1 billion to extend human lifespan

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doubling down on Retro Biosciences, a biotech startup based in San Francisco that wants humans to live 10 years longer than what it calls a healthy human lifespan.

Altman previously provided Retro Biosciences’ entire seed round of $180 million. Now, the startup is raising a $1 billion Series A that Altman is joining, the Financial Times reports.

The biotech’s first drug candidate to be tested in a trial is a pill that restores a cell’s internal recycling process, the failure of which has been linked to diseases such as Alzheimer’s — the most common form of dementia with more than 55mn sufferers worldwide. But drug developers have struggled to turn back the clock on the disease, with existing treatments only slowing patients’ decline. The next two drugs will be cell therapies, one of which will also target Alzheimer’s by replacing the brain cells known as microglia, in a plan that Betts-LaCroix said is a “bit more sci-fi but extremely powerful”. The third is a treatment to replace stem cells in the blood with younger ones. “If you’re 85 years old and you undergo this therapy, you can replace your blood stem cells with ones that are zero age, and then those ripple out and produce all your blood,” he said. “So basically, it’s like having 80 per cent of all your cells become zero age.”

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#3

The more the merrier. Can’t hurt, might help. Having said that, the results of similar efforts by Silicon Valley tech bros, like the Google effort have shown very disappointing delivery - at least so far. It is my suspicion that the tech bros are not familiar with the special requirements of medical research, and not being familiar with the field, tend to hire random people to put in charge, with poor results. They need to put someone like Matt Kaeberlein in charge of the research, but not knowing the field, they don’t know of MK. Look at Bryan Johnson, another tech bro - his whole approach is like a tech startup, throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the body assuming that somehow all of this synergizes and optimizes in an additive manner. And he ends up with a giant pile of higgedly piggedly heaped together supplements, drugs and interventions. Who is in charge of all this, and does he know who is truly qualified?

Anyhow, I wish this venture success, since we can all benefit, hopefully. We’ll see.

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