{Disarmed} The startup Altos Labs wants to keep us young forever, and Jeff Bezos is one of its investors
Dorian Gray looks at his portrait amazed . He looks great and handsome. With all the splendor of youth. Suddenly he says: I would give my best to stay this young forever, including his soul. The story created by the mythical Oscar Wilde is well known - as is his film adaptations - and the dream of eternal youth too, but there are those who want to make it come true, and not precisely with portraits.
It is at least what Altos Labs wants, a mysterious startup that according to sources close to its plans is working on cell regeneration and, ultimately, on methods to rejuvenate animals and even human beings. Those who believe in that idea are not selling their souls to the devil, but they are investing a lot of money in Altos Labs. Among them, Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon, and Yuri Millner, billionaire who made his fortune on Facebook and Mail.ru.
Forever young?
Altos Labs was created in early 2021 and already has offices in Silicon Balley, San Diego, the UK and Japan, and they appear to be recruiting astronomically paid scientists and academics to study cell aging and how to slow and reverse it.
Those same sources cited in MIT Technology Review assure that one of the investors of Altos Labs is Jeff Bezos , creator of Amazon and the richest person in the world today. Yuri Milner and his wife are also investors in a company that reminds us of Calico Labs , the startup dedicated to the study of longevity that Larry Page created in 2013.
In xiaomist.com Darwin's Crooked Lines: Myths and Truths of EpigeneticsSome of the members of the Altos Labs team are already celebrities in the scientific world who have worked in the field of cell regeneration with mixed results . Shinya Yamanaka, who shared the Nobel Prize in 2012 for cell reprogramming, is on the board of directors, for example.
There have been other attempts in this area , but Altos Labs seems to be one of the most promising startups both in terms of attracting talent and money: it is estimated that they have already "raised" more than 270 million dollars of investment .
Manuel Serrano, from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, explained that Altos Labs has offered him a job in which he will earn between five and ten times what he is earning right now. " The philosophy of Altos Labs is to do research guided by curiosity ." Serrano will join the company's team in the United Kingdom, and like the rest of the team it seems that initially he will not aim to find products or an immediate financial return, but to achieve great scientific discoveries.
If an effective treatment is achieved, it could be worth billions of dollars , but at Altos Labs they want to "understand rejuvenation," said Serrano. "I would say that the idea of having benefits in the future is there, but it is not the immediate objective."
Of course there are scientists who are not at all clear that cell regeneration is sufficiently prepared to propose rejuvenation systems such as those that are being developed at Altos Labs. Alejandro Ocampo, professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, believes that " the concept it's solid, but there are too many expectations . "
For this expert, one of the problems is that reprogramming not only makes cells act as if they were younger, but also changes their identity. For example, it changes a skin cell into a stem cell , something that makes this technology dangerous for human use.
"I think this discipline is moving too fast," said Ocampo. "I don't know if we should have between five and eight reprogramming companies, it seems that everything is going too fast. How many studies have there been on reprogramming? The same number of startups working on this issue."
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The news The startup Altos Labs wants to make us young forever, and Jeff Bezos is one of its investors was originally published in xiaomist.com by Javier Pastor .
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