Inside the billion-dollar quest to live beyond 100 (FT)

#1

The launch of Altos Labs represented something of a coming of age for the business of trying to prolong youth.

With a vast $3bn of financial backing, GSK’s former chief scientific officer in charge and a mission to rejuvenate the human body, the California-based biotech in 2022 embarked on research on how to reverse disease and restore healthy cells — and kicked off serious interest in longevity.

Of course, researchers have been studying the ageing process for decades and interest in treatments and cures stretches back millennia. By the 2010s, investors had started to test the water with companies such as Calico Life Sciences and Cambrian Biopharma. But it was the Altos Labs deal in 2022 that marked a new level of investor commitment.

Three years on, it remains the highest-profile longevity biotech and has had early success with experiments in mice that involved partially reprogramming cells to make them healthier and live longer.

But there are also hundreds of other start-ups in the market. Earlier this year, Retro Biosciences said it was in the process of raising $1bn, including money from existing investor Sam Altman, to fund clinical trials for three potential drugs that it hopes could treat Alzheimer’s and rejuvenate blood and brain cells.

Others in the field include NewLimit, a genetic reprogramming start-up co-founded by Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong, which announced in May that it had raised $130mn in a series B funding round. Cambrian, an incubator and investor in longevity start-ups, raised $100mn in series C funding in 2021.

Meanwhile, scientific understanding of ageing is progressing and all kinds of treatment options are being investigated, from the rejuvenating properties of young blood to drugs that block cell death.

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#2

Related:

Inside Altos Labs: the biotech titan cracking the code to the elixir of youth

The billion-dollar start-up is tantalisingly close to the holy grail of age reversal

It is one of humanity’s ultimate scientific and technological quests, alongside putting a man on the moon and unlocking the structure of DNA. Now the biotech industry’s progress in developing age-reversing treatments that could revolutionise the quality of life of millions of older people is entering a crucial new phase.

Just three years after its creation, the leader in this field, Altos Labs, appears to be ready to start planning full-scale human clinical trials for the first time. The moment of truth may finally be close. Can scientists really turn back the clock?

Altos — described as the world’s best funded start-up — has attracted the $3 billion backing of billionaires including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, the Russian-Israeli founder of investment firm DST Global. It is named after the Los Altos Hills in California where Milner owns a spectacular $100m French chateau-style super mansion complete with ballroom, home theatre, indoor and outdoor pools.

The mission? To find the hard reset button on cells that could “reverse disease, injury and the disabilities that occur throughout life”.

This would, according to Altos Labs’ president Hans Bishop, lengthen the human “healthspan” — allowing people to experience good health into their later years. Increased longevity, added Bishop, would only be an “accidental consequence” of their work, although clearly a very welcome one. So far the experiments and research have been limited to mice and human cells. But according to chief scientific officer and co-founder Rick Klausner, “We’re going to move into humans as quickly as possible.”

The appointment last month of Dr Joan Mannick as chief medical officer is being seen as a sign that the company is poised to do just that by advancing to full clinical trials of its cellular rejuvenation technology.

Mannick is seen as a leader in the field of designing and running clinical programs in ageing biology, and brings decades of experience in ageing-focused drug development, including her role as CEO and co-founder of Tornado Therapeutics. She is also an expert in navigating the regulatory pathways through what she described in one interview as “unexplored territory in clinical development”.

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#3

Joan Mannick at Altos Labs :eyes:

#4

Yes, I am still wondering what happened at tornado therapeutics…

#5

The same thought crossed my mind. Altos is so well-funded you could see how bailing out of Tornado might have been worth it even if things looked good at Tornado, but it will be interesting to see if anything comes out about the path forward for Tornado.

#6

Yes - that is all true, but it’s highly unusual for the founder of a biotech company to bail out so early after starting the company. I have to wonder if there was some bad data coming out from their early clinical or pre-clinical testing, that drove her to give it up.

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#7

Has she actually bailed out of Tornado or does she currently have two jobs?..…and potentially the intention of Altos buying out the Tornado IP.

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#8

In the end the question that is key is what the underlying mechanism of aging is. If you aim therapeutics without having an idea of the fundamentals then it is a bit random and scattergun.

Tornado is in the end only about mTOR.

Altos is about Yamanaka and methylation.

Personally I think mTOR is only important within the context of influencing mitophagy and the only important Yamaka factor is SOX2 which encourages autophagy.

The acetylation synergies operate in more dimensions than only autophagy.

#9

You don’t necessarily need to know the underlying mechanism of how something works if it works. For example, until recently we didn’t even know how minoxidil grows hair but we still ended up using it for decades regardless.

#10

There is no conflict between my statement and yours. The difficulty arises when you combine interventions. The ITP finds that some combinations make lifespan worse than the interventions in isolation.