New Company Raises Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for Anti-Aging Research

MIT's Technology Review reports on "Silicon Valley's latest wild bet on living forever," the newly-formed Altos Labs which it describes as "an ambitious new anti-aging company... "Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life."The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process. Some people briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos... Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Salk declined to comment. The article points out that a securities disclosure filed in California "indicates the company has raised at least $270 million, according to Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia who reviewed the document."

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