Death is very likely the single best invention of Life,’ Steve Jobs once observed. ‘It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.’
There are many who would beg to disagree with the co-founder of Apple, who died in 2011 — not least his peers in Silicon Valley.
For it is they who are leading a charge towards a new frontier in medicine that will revolutionise our ‘healthspans’ — the number of years of good health we can expect to enjoy — and push back the worst effects of ageing.
The announcement this week that a new anti-ageing company, Altos Labs, which is based in the U.S. and UK, has been established to ‘hack’ the ageing process has reignited interest in the science of rejuvenation, an obsession that has spanned continents and the ages.
A new anti-ageing company, Altos Labs, which is based in the U.S. and UK, has been established to ‘hack’ the ageing process has reignited interest in the science of rejuvenation
And the answer lies not in the mythical elixir of youth but in the decidedly less alluring process of ‘in vivo cellular reprogramming’ — more of which later.
Altos has no problem raising money with backers that include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, worth an estimated $188 billion.
Altos also has a deep-pocketed co-founder, Yuri Milner at 59. He is a Russian billionaire investor in dotcoms and a Kremlin-connected Russian billionaire. Milner was also a friend to eco-campaigning stars like Leonardo DiCaprio (Tom Cruise) and Prince Harry. (Another co-founder is Dr Rick Klausner, former head of America’s National Cancer Institute.)
The venture, which is based on three campuses — two in California and a third in Cambridge (where Dr Wolf Reik, an expert in gene regulation, will run the UK end of the Altos operation) — revealed yesterday it had amassed $3 billion in start-up funding alone.
In further proof that there is an open chequebook at Altos Labs, the company announced that it had poached one of the world’s most respected scientists, the American Hal Barron, to be its chief executive.
Barron was previously chief scientific officer at British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline where he’d been paid more than its CEO, earning an annual salary of £8.2 million.
‘I am deeply honoured to have been offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead such a unique company with a transformative mission to reverse disease,’ said Mr Barron on Wednesday.
He is joined by a host of other illustrious scientists — including Nobel laureates — on the Altos board or as advisers.
Barron’s words put a positive spin on the aims of a venture that some have dismissed as the ultimate billionaire vanity exercise.
Altos has no problem raising money with backers that include Jeff Bezos from Amazon, a company worth an estimated $188 billion.
Bezos is also said to have backed another company, Unity Biotechnology, which is developing ‘senolytic drugs’ which would rid the body of ‘senescent cells’ — old cells which do not die but which secrete damaging chemicals.
They are also known as “zombie cells” and have been associated with osteoporosis, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and osteoporosis. These drugs have been shown to improve the health of patients in limited clinical trials.
Others Silicon Valley giants supporting anti-ageing research include Mark Zuckerberg, Google founder Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Jim Mellon is a British billionaire who has started Juvenescence as his personal life extension business.
Some cynics may argue that they are influenced by the assumption that ageing can simply be treated with enough money.
For the man who has everything — and it is usually men — it is understandable that you would want to put off that dreaded day when all those billions just cease to matter.
And yet, the myriad top flight scientists involved in this lucratively-remunerated field insist their research won’t only help the likes of Bezos and Zuckerberg to live longer, but could transform and extend the lives of untold millions of people, banishing diseases — particularly those associated with ageing.
How? It was simple for Ursula Andress to just take a dip in the mysterious cold flames during the 1960s film She. This allowed her to retain her youthful beauty and youth despite having been 2,000 years of age. Altos Labs’ science is complicated, but it is also less glamorous.
Two recent breakthroughs are the basis of this firm’s research. Yamanaka transcription factors are the first.
They are named after a Nobel Prize-winning Japanese scientist, Dr Shinya Yamanaka, who in 2006 shocked the world when he discovered that by adding just four gene-regulating proteins — known as ‘Yamanaka factors’ — to cells they could be ‘reprogrammed’ to return to a younger and far more adaptable form, so-called ‘embryonic stem cells’.
Bezos is also said to have backed another company, Unity Biotechnology, which is developing ‘senolytic drugs’ which would rid the body of ‘senescent cells’ — old cells which do not die but which secrete damaging chemicals
It’s a process that’s been compared to restoring an electronic device to its factory settings.
Stem cells are the body’s raw materials — from which all other cells in the body, from skin cells to liver cells to brain and nerve cells and every cell in between, are generated.
Under the right, controlled conditions in the laboratory or in the body — in vivo — the stem cells will divide to form yet more cells. These embryonic stem cells can be used to regenerate or repair diseased tissue and organs — and even rejuvenate the whole body.
Altos Labs is Dr Yamanaka’s unpaid advisor. It has also hired two Spanish scientists, who applied the discovery to mice. So far, the results are mixed.
Some mice showed signs of aging, but others had tumours. This problem was addressed.
Additional experiments with mice have shown that reprogramming cells may be able to stop progeria (a rare genetic condition that makes children age quickly), speed up healing of injuries, and protect the liver from paracetamol damage.
Manuel Serrano from Spain will join the Altos Team. He will be based at Cambridge which is already a major international center for stem cell research, an important part of anti-ageing science.
His countryman, biochemist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, has forecast that humans could live for around 50 years longer than the current average life span of around 80 using stem-cell therapies. He has even gone so far as to claim the Yamanaka discovery amounts to a genuine ‘elixir of life’ — which is just the sort of language the tech barons want to hear.
The other key scientific breakthrough which Altos Labs will investigate concerns the so-called ‘integrated stress response’ (ISR) pathway in humans.
High levels of stress have been shown to cause cell damage in the human body, according to studies. The new cells that are created from these cells can also become damaged if they undergo cell division.
An emergency reset programme can be activated if the ISR senses that there is a problem. If that fails, the ISR will destroy any rogue cells and stop further damage.
However, ISR pathways can malfunction and resetting them will be a focus of Altos Labs’ research. Altos Labs’ research will include artificial intelligence. This is because cells are made up of many millions of molecules. Insiders say that without current computing technology to crunch the vast amount of data that will be generated, the firm’s research ambitions would never have been possible.
Manuel Serrano from Spain will join the Altos Team. He will be based at Cambridge which is already a major international center for stem cell research, an important part of anti-ageing science.
However, no matter how many scientists are at the top of their game and how much money is poured into Altos Labs’s laboratories, there’s no guarantee that they will succeed.
Critics claim that too much current research rests on the misconception that the human body functions in a similar way to a machine. These critics counter the idea that biology cannot be controlled and argue that because death is inevitable evolution has placed greater emphasis on our ability to grow and reproduce than it does on repairing our DNA.
Altos Labs insiders say the firm isn’t about making a fast buck but embarking on ‘curiosity-driven’ research that could eventually unlock one of Nature’s greatest secrets.
The ethical implications of rejuvenation are complex. If we forget about the terrifying demographic implications of an aging population, and assume that any breakthrough will first benefit the wealthy and powerful, then would you want a world where tyrants remain in power forever and billionaires become more outrageously rich?
To be blunt, would we want to give Jeff Bezos — whose company is killing the High Street, paying trifling amounts in taxes and having a devastating environmental impact — another lifetime to do it all over again?
Bezos seems obsessed with the Grim Reaper, an avid sci-fi fan on whose empty wallet Altos’ success may depend.
In his final letter to Amazon shareholders when he resigned as boss last July, he quoted the British biologist Richard Dawkins: ‘Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at . . . If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings.’
But whether Altos Labs becomes Silicon Valley’s latest passing fad or a medical revolution that benefits all mankind, it certainly won’t be for lack of cash or scientific brainpower.