Altos Labs, a mysterious start-up that gives little away about itself and the rumour mill suggests is financially backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has reportedly moved to set up a Cambridge research lab. The company, whose goal is to increase human longevity, was only incorporated late last year in the USA and in the UK in June and is now setting up several international research facilities.
Other locations including the San Francisco Bay Area on Silicon Valley’s doorstep and Japan will, alongside the Cambridge site, look to recruit some of the world’s most outstanding scientific minds.
Altos Labs aims to develop “biological reprogramming technology”. What that means practically is finding ways to rejuvenate cells in a lab environment in ways scientists think could be extended to “revitalise” the whole bodies of living animals. Prolonging human life is the ultimate goal.
The start-up clearly has some solid financial backing with it offering salaries of up to $1 million a year (£720 million) in an effort to entice leading specialists to work for it. It is expected that scientists will be working on a deeper understanding of how cells age and what might be done to reverse that process.
An MIT Technology Review report that says Altos Labs is backed by both Yuri Milner, a Russian-Israeli billionaire who made a fortune as an early investor in both Facebook and Twitter, and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who recently stepped back from the chief executive position at the company. The start-up would not be the first focused on longevity to attract financial backing from the world’s richest individuals.
Google co-founder Larry Page was one of the driving forces, organisationally and financially, behind Calico, a start-up with the stated aim of “achieving immortality”. PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a lead investor in San Francisco longevity start-up Unity Biotechnology, which Mr Bezos has also invested in. Unity’s ambition is to “extend human healthspan, the period in one’s life unburdened by the disease of ageing”.
The MIT Technology Review says Altos has already raised at least $270 million from investors since late last year. There appears to be plenty of investor appetite for longevity start-ups and the market is, according to market researchers CB Insights, expected to be worth over $271 billion by 2024.
The start-up has already recruited the Spanish biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who believes humans could live for around 50 years longer and Shinya Yamanaka, a scientist whose research on reprogramming cells to reverse ageing has been dubbed an “elixir of life”.
The new Cambridge lab will hope to use its location to recruit some of the top stem cell researchers based in the area which is home to the world-leading MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute funded by the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The region is a biotech hub with numerous successful start-ups include gene sequencing start-up Cambridge Analytica being spun out of the university and related research facilities over the years.