Altos Labs, Inc. is an American

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

research company. Altos Labs' goal is to develop

life extension Life extension is the concept of extending the human life expectancy, lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled oldest people, limit of 125 years. S ...

therapies that can halt or reverse the human aging process. Specialized cell therapies based on

induced pluripotent stem cells Induced pluripotent stem cells (also known as iPS cells or iPSCs) are a type of pluripotent stem cell that can be generated directly from a somatic cell. The iPSC technology was pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka's lab in Kyoto, Japan, who showed in ...

are to be developed for this purpose. The company was started in 2022.

History

Altos Labs was formally started on 19 January 2022. The name Altos Labs is based on the city of Los Altos in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. The idea for Altos Labs originated with cell biologist and entrepreneur Richard D. Klausner, who co-founded the company with Hans Bishop. One of the early investors of Altos Labs is an investment vehicle held for the benefit of the Breakthrough Foundation, founded by Russian-Israeli science and technology investor and philanthropist

Yuri Milner Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (russian: Юрий Борисович (Бенционович) Мильнер; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He is a cofounder and former c ...

and his wife Julia. The foundation supports existing and future philanthropic projects in fundamental sciences. Milner had previously shown interest in anti-aging technologies, in October 2020, he co-hosted a meeting where experts presented their research, reported on animal testing, and the concept for Altos Labs was developed. The company has been able to recruit prominent scientists such as Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte (known for his work on rejuvenation through cell reprogramming),

Steve Horvath Steve Horvath is a German–American aging researcher, geneticist, and biostatistician. As the familyname Horváth indicates, he is of hungarian ancestry. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles known for developing the Epi ...

(known for his work on the epigenetic aging clock), and

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese stem cell researcher and a Nobel Prize laureate. He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto ...

(the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of cellular reprogramming in mammalian cells). The board of directors also includes well-known scientists such as Jennifer A. Doudna,

David Baltimore David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technolo ...

, and

Frances Arnold Frances Hamilton Arnold (born July 25, 1956) is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In ...

. Salaries for principal investigators at Altos Labs may be ten times higher than at comparable research institutions. In 2021, Altos Labs was registered in the United States and the United Kingdom. It will operate out of California (U.S.) and

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

(U.K.), with some work performed in Japan. Altos Labs raised $3 billion in a funding round from investors in January 2022. It is said to be the best funded biotech start-up to date. Investors reportedly included

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

founder

Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ''né'' Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former preside ...

. Altos Labs plans to establish research facilities in

, the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

, and in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

as a first step. Atypical of a private company, the initial focus will be on

basic research Basic research, also called pure research or fundamental research, is a type of scientific research with the aim of improving scientific theories for better understanding and prediction of natural or other phenomena. In contrast, applied resear ...

without immediate prospects of a commercially viable product. In January 2022 the company's president, Hans Bishop, argued, that Altos Labs was working on increasing the "

healthspan Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, current age, and other demographic factors like sex. The most commonly used measure is life expectancy at birth ...

" of humans and that longevity extension would only be "an accidental consequence".

External links

References

{{Life extension Biotechnology companies of the United States

History

External links

See also

References