Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) ex-CEO Jeff Bezos is assembling an all-star team of scientists to assist in his dream of developing immortality technology.
The second richest man in the world is funneling his money into a new biotech company dubbed Altos Labs, which formerly launched this week. The anti-aging startup will be working on a protein guiding technique that direct cells toward a youthful state.
Altos, which will initially be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and in Cambridge, UK, with significant collaborations in Japan, has recently recruited a top notch team of scientists tasked with defeating death.
The team includes Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, the winner of the 2012 Nobel prize in medicine for his work in stem cell research, Spanish biochemist and Altos’ head researcher Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a former professor at Salk Institute who worked on organ regeneration, and Jennifer Doudna, the co-winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry for her role in developing CRISPR, a genetic engineering technology that has radically changed genomics research.
The company’s executive brass meanwhile consists of Rick Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute, and Ann Lee-Karlon, former Senior Vice President at Genentech. Altos has also tapped as its CEO, Hal Barron, formerly the chief scientific officer at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.
“I am deeply honored to have been offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead such a unique company with a transformative mission to reverse disease,” Barron said in a press release from the ambitious start-up.”It’s clear from work by Shinya Yamanaka, and many others since his initial discoveries, that cells have the ability to rejuvenate, resetting their epigenetic clocks and erasing damage from a myriad of stressors. These insights, combined with major advances in a number of transformative technologies, inspired Altos to reimagine medical treatments where reversing disease for patients of any age is possible.”
Along with a team of powerful scientists and researchers, the Bezos-backed startup also announced that it has secured more than $3 billion in funding at launch.
Bezos, who has funded similar research in the past, previously investing in Unity Biotechnology (NASDAQ:UBX), a clinical-stage biotech company doing research in anti-aging therapies in an effort to “slow, halt, or even reverse diseases of aging,” isn’t the only billionaire helping fund Alto Labs either. Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner is also pitching in to help develop anti-aging technology.
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