70 The Economist January 22nd 2022
Science & technology
BiotechnologyBackwards ran the sands of time
S
tartups comeand startups go. But few
startups start with $3bn in the bank. Yet
that is the fortunate position in which Al
tos Labs finds itself. Though preparations
for the launch of what must surely be a
candidate for the title of “Best financed
startup in history” have been rumoured for
months, the firm formally announced it
self, and its modus operandi, on January
19th. And, even at $3bn, its proposed pro
duct might be thought cheap at the price.
For the alchemy its founders, Rick Klaus
ner, Hans Bishop and Yuri Milner, hope
one day to offer the world is an elixir of life.
Others have tried this in the past. In
2013 an outfit called Calico Life Sciences
was set up under the aegis of Google (now
Alphabet), with Larry Page, one of that
firm’s founders, as an interested party. It
has yet to generate a product. In the same
year Craig Venter, who ran a private version
of the human genome project, and Peter
Diamandis, who started the X Prize Foun
dation, got together to launch Human Lon
gevity, though they subsequently fell out.
That company, too, has gone quiet. Andthere are a string of other hopefuls in the
field, many with billionaires like Dr Milner
and Mr Page lurking in the background. In
deed, there are rumours, which Altos will
not confirm, that Jeff Bezos is one of its in
vestors—for the prolongation of life is a
field that seems particularly attractive to
the man (and it usually is a man) who oth
erwise has everything.A walk in the hills
The founders of Altos do, though, seem
deadly serious about what they are up to.
Looking at discoveries in biology made ov
er the past few decades—two of these, in
particular—they believe they have
glimpsed the outline of an answer to the
question of how to reverse the process ofcellular ageing. They have also recruited a
starstudded scientific cast to help them
track that answer down. Illnesses poten
tially in their crosshairs include cognitive
disorders and neurodegeneration, diabe
tes and associated metabolic problems,
and cancer. Dealing with these might not,
in the end, greatly extend average life
spans. But it would surely increase what is
known in the argot as healthspan.
The idea that became Altos was
dreamed up by Dr Klausner, a former head
of America’s National Cancer Institute, and
Dr Milner, an entrepreneur and venture
capitalist with fingers in many technologi
cal pies, in a series of covidescaping walks
in Los Altos, a hilly, wellheeled suburb on
the edge of Silicon Valley. They then re
cruited Mr Bishop, formerly boss of grail,
a cancerdetection company, to be the
business brains.
The two findings around which the firm
is built are Yamanaka transcription factors
and the integrated stressresponse (isr)
pathway. Yamanaka factors, discovered in
2006 by Yamanaka Shinya of Kyoto Univer
sity, are four generegulating proteins
which serve, in essence, to return a cell to
factory settings. In this case “factory set
tings” means a state known as pluripoten
cy that is enjoyed by embryonic stem cells.
Pluripotent cells are those that can give
rise to descendants capable of differentiat
ing into a wide variety of specialised cells.
Early experiments involving the induc
tion of Yamanaka factors in laboratory aniRejuvenation has been a fantasy since the dawn of storytelling.
Could an instant unicorn make it come true?→Alsointhissection
72 Babies,salivaandsocialrelations
72 Testingformalariadrugresistance
73 A green light for saving sharks