Inside the $3bn quest to defy ageing that Jeff Bezos is backing (The Times)

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Altos Labs, the world’s richest longevity start-up, is aiming to ‘rejuvenate’ human beings. Here’s a glimpse of what its scientists have discovered so far

The world has never quite seen a start-up like Altos Labs. Launched in 2022, it combined a line-up of luminary scientists with a $3 billion war chest from investors reported to include Jeff Bezos, the Amazon tycoon. The goal was audacious: to “rejuvenate” human beings, restoring to the old the resilience against disease and injury that the young take for granted.

Three years on, the first tangible signs of progress are emerging — not in splashy press releases, but in peer-reviewed journals and early-stage “preprints” of scientific papers. Stitch them together and a potential new era in medicine moves into view — where bodies are “reprogrammed” at a cellular level to fend off frailty, treatments are calibrated to keep your DNA young, and the application of AI ultimately allows us, in the words of one of these studies, to “escape ageing”.

So what exactly have the scientists at the world’s best-funded longevity start-up been working on?

Read the full story: Inside the $3bn quest to defy ageing that Jeff Bezos is backing (The Times)

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#2

The question behind this is whether development and the phenotype is driven by differentiation and (a program) or (metabolism and the mitochondria/slc25a1). The problem with the idea that it is a computer program with a backup copy somewhere is that we don’t know where this program is stored.

I think the reason why the expression of Yamanaka factors has some rejuvenating effects is that SOX2 (one of the four nuclear factors) drives autophagy.

Hence the expression of SOX2 may give a route towards improved metabolism, but I am not myself persuaded that the other yamanaka factors are a positive.

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#3

I tend not to think of it as a question of either vs or. I am inclined to believe it is a network effect. Its hard for me to conjure that Nature operates an an isolationist.
When it comes to the network, one has to ponder which driver of the network might play a dominant hand!