In a bid to treat blindness, Life Biosciences will try out potent cellular reprogramming technology on volunteers.
When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn’t put much time into the problem but suspects it is “very solvable” and that when scientists discover why we age, it’s going to be something “obvious.”
Not long after, the Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair jumped into the conversation on X to strongly agree with the world’s richest man. “Aging has a relatively simple explanation and is apparently reversible,” wrote Sinclair. “Clinical Trials begin shortly.”
“ER-100?” Musk asked.
“Yes” replied Sinclair.
ER-100 turns out to be the code name of a treatment created by Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup that Sinclair cofounded and which he confirmed today has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers.
The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming” that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech.
The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off.
“Reprogramming is like the AI of the bio world. It’s the thing everyone is funding,” says Karl Pfleger, an investor who backs a smaller UK startup, Shift Bioscience. He says Sinclair’s company has recently been seeking additional funds to keep advancing its treatment.
Read the full story: The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly” (MIT Tech Review)
