A new company is receiving funds from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, dedicated to reversing the ageing process.
Altos Labs is a research-based company founded earlier this year which is currently hiring scientists with offers of $1 million annual salaries.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 57, has invested in Altos Labs, a US startup dedicated to reversing the ageing process and extending the human lifespan.
MIT Tech Review recently reported that Bezos and other billionaires interested in living forever invested substantially in the biotech Silicon Valley startup founded earlier this year.
Altos Labs is currently pursuing biological reprogramming technology, which adds proteins to a cell to revert to a stem-cell-like state before differentiation.
This startup is presently recruiting leading genetic engineering scientists and is offering an annual salary of more than 1 million US dollars.
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is one of the many who has invested in this firm.
Bezos has invested in his investment office Bezos Expeditions, but the exact amount is unknown.
According to the data released by Altos Labs in June, the company has attracted at least 270 million dollars in investment from various investors, including Bezos and Milner.
“It’s been said that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young,” Bezos had stepped down as CEO of Amazon in July.
In February, Bezos wrote a letter to staff saying he would spend his time on philanthropic pursuits and projects that coincide with his passion, including his space exploration company Blue Origin.
Altos Labs would mainly focus on a technology called reprogramming, which works by adding proteins to a cell that essentially instruct it to revert to a stem-cell-like state.
Scientist Shinya Yamanaka had won a joint Nobel Prize in 2012 for demonstrating this technique on mice. Shortly, Yamanaka will be joining Alto Labs as chair of its scientific advisory board.
“Although there are multiple hurdles to overcome, there is a lot of potentials,” Yamanaka told MIT Tech Review.
The company was first incorporated in April, while the UK based Companies House records show it was included there in June. Altos Labs has plans to establish institutes in California, the UK, and Japan.
The company was formed after a two-day conference on anti-ageing biotech at the Palo Alto mansion of Russian investor and tech mogul Yuri Milner.
CONCLUSION:
The reprogramming would essentially involve adding proteins to a cell which instructs it to revert to a stem-cell-like state.
This technique had won Scientist Shinya Yamanaka a Nobel Prize in the year 2012 after he had demonstrated the method in mice.
The company incorporated in the US and the UK is also planning to establish multiple institutes in Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan to expand its research.
For Jeff Bezos, venturing and investing in anti-ageing research is nothing new. The Amazon founder had invested in another company in 2018 as well that also focused on anti-ageing.
The former CEO was brought on board by biotech company Unity Technologies that are currently working on making anti-ageing therapies.
