Retro Biosciences, a startup with $180 million from Sam Altman, has a simple and audacious goal: Add 10 good years to your life. And until now, we haven’t had a glimpse of its best ideas.
The company Betts-LaCroix started, alongside the scientists Matt Buckley and Sheng Ding, is called Retro Biosciences Inc. and has a pitch that’s as ambitious as Silicon Valley gets. It wants to give every human 10 additional years of healthy, vigorous life. To pull this off, and pull it off quickly, Retro has eschewed a number of biotechnology startup traditions. Most notably, instead of chasing a single super-promising compound or treatment, it’s decided to pursue five tracks of research at the same time. It’s a high-risk, costly strategy made possible only by the company’s unusual backing. Retro has raised $180 million from one investor—Sam Altman, OpenAI Inc.’s co-founder and [recently ousted and de-ousted] chief executive officer.
The company of about 50 people has small teams shooting for breakthroughs in autophagy (the removal of damaged cells), the rejuvenation of blood plasma and three research programs tied to what the biotech industry calls partial cell reprogramming.
The amount of money that Retro, NewLimit and Altos Labs have raised is both staggering and not. These companies are pursuing technology that could reshape human life. In a world where Hollywood will place equal-size financial bets on several movies in the coming year, it’s actually almost shocking that more companies haven’t opted to chase what could be the best business of all time.
The “partial reprogramming” stuff (David Sinclair’s research) scares me. Having done my share of reprogramming in the tissue culture dish, doing it systemically sounds like a recipe for cancers. Perhaps “partial reprogramming” is a more targeted process but until it can be targeted to single genes and until the dosage of gene expression from those genes can be precisely modulated I think this is a distant dream. Help me understand what I’m missing here?
One huge problem with this approach is that even if human embryonic stem cells (I use this example because HESC’s are producing the precisely correct amounts of Sox2, klf4, Oct4 and cMyc) are injected into immunodeficient (nude) mice they will form large tumors due to unregulated growth and differentiation outside of their embryonic niche. The niche is important for stabilizing the stem cells and allowing the stem cell to produce daughter cells when necessary.
Now if one were to make induced pluripotent stem cells from skin fibroblasts and inject them into the peritoneal space of the same person that donated the skin fibroblasts (so an autologous transplant) they would likely grow into tumors called teratomas at some frequency. These tumors get very large, produce many different tissue types (teeth, brain, muscle, kidney etc). There is no incompatibility with the immune system so the cells are not effectively destroyed by the immune system.
To take it one step further, what we are really interested in are tissue specific stem cells (muscle stem cells, neural stem cells, skin stem cells etc) These are not pluripotent but can be theoretically derived from pluripotent cells given the right cytokine que’s and the correct niche environment. The hypothesis that randomly expressing KOSM in cells in vivo will produce pluripotent stem cells outside of develomental niche’s for them to be useful. I’d predict they’d grow into teratomas in the same way injection of induced pluripotent cells would if they were autologous-ly injected.
