Immortality, closer and closer: Altos gets 3,000 million to investigate cell rejuvenation

After months of speculation, Altos Labs finally sees the light. The new biotechnology company, focused on the programming of cellular rejuvenation, has a capital of 3,000 million dollars and a team made up of Nobel laureates, prestigious investors and scientific leaders.

Leading the Altos executive team is Dr Hal Barron, until now President of R&D and Chief Scientific Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Along with him, Dr. Rick Klausner, chief scientist and founder; Hans Bishop, President and Founder; and Dr. Ann Lee-Karlon, director of operations.

Altos was born with the aim of “unraveling biology to restore health and reverse disease, injury, and disability”. To do so, it combines the best of academia and business: the freedom to tackle the most complex problems in biology with the ability to foster collaborations to transform medicine.

It is unknown who the investors behind Altos are, although in September 2021 the rumor spread that among them would be Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Russian billionaire Yuri Miller. So far, the company has only said that they are “big-name business builders and investors.”

According to the magazine MIT Technology Review, Altos offers prestigious scientists salaries typical of sports stars, $1 million a year or more, along with your own funds and freedom from the hassles of applying for grants.

The company will have offices in United Statess, in the San Francisco Bay and in San Diego, and in United Kingdom, specifically in the city of Cambridge. It will also carry out important collaborations in Japan. The Institute of Science, directed by Dr. Peter Walter, will be located in the San Francisco Bay, and the Institute of Medicine will be located in San Diego, headed by Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. The Cambridge Institute will be headed by Dr. Wolf Reik.

Altos is not the first business project to emerge in pursuit of preventing the aging of human beings. Created in 2013 by Google co-founder Larry Page, Calico He started off strong, incorporating members of the scientific and academic elite into his team. Nevertheless, in eight years he has only published one paper on cell reprogramming.