The race to increase human life span through biotech just got tighter.
Retro Biosciences, the AI-powered company whose mission is to develop therapies that reverse age-related disease, has just announced a $1 billion round of funding toward that goal. It will back clinical trials for three drugs—including a potential Alzheimer’s disease treatment that’s set to enter an early-stage trial in Australia this year.
Some of the investment will come from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who also provided the initial $180 million to seed the startup. The fundraising is being led by Italian financier Sandro Salsano, who has joined the board.
It’s all toward the goal to “reduce human misery,” Retro Biosciences CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix told the Financial Times. “Right now if someone gets Alzheimer’s, it doesn’t matter what your resources are. You know, if you’re like Joe Biden, or Elon [Musk], or whoever, you can write as big a check as you want to anybody, and nobody knows how to cure it.”
Altman is not the only tech billionaire to have filled the coffers of efforts to extend life span and health span (the length of time humans remain in good health). Jeff Bezos contributed to anti-aging startup Alto Labs, while Peter Thiel gave to the Methuselah Foundation, which aims to make “90 the new 50 by 2030.” And Isomorphic Labs, which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery and to advance human health, just announced it will have an AI-designed drug in trials by the end of this year.
Retro Biosciences, in partnership with OpenAI, uses AI to design proteins that temporarily turn regular cells into stem cells, which the company says can reverse the aging process. According to the Financial Times, the San Francisco–based company is in discussion with potential supporters including venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds, as well as a massive data center in the U.S. that could potentially run its AI models.
In addition to the early-stage drug study that will target Alzheimer’s—a pill that “restores a cell’s internal recycling process,” according to the report—the lab is working on cell therapies for rejuvenating blood and brain cells. One will also target Alzheimer’s—by replacing the brain cells known as microglia—and another is a treatment to replace stem cells in the blood with younger ones.
“If you’re 85 years old and you undergo this therapy, you can replace your blood stem cells with ones that are zero age, and then those ripple out and produce all your blood,” Bett-LaCroix told the Times.
And he’s determined to move fast. “The line we’re drawing in the sand is, damn it, we’re going to have our first drug out in the 2020s,” he said.
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