Only three years after its founding, the leader in this area, Altos Labs, seems to be ready to plan for the first time on full scale of human clinical tests. The moment of truth can finally be close. Can scientists really turn the clock back?
Altos-described as the world’s best-financed start-up-up-up has hired the $ 3 billion support from billionaires, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Yuri Milner, the Russian-Israeli founder of investment firm DST Global. It is named after the Los Altos Hills in California, where Milner has a spectacular super mansion of $ 100 million, complete with ballroom, home cinema, indoor and outdoor swimming pools.
The mission? To find the hard reset button on cells that can “reverse the disease, injury and disabilities that occur throughout life”.
According to Altos Labs’ President Hans Bishop, this would extend the human ‘healthspan’ – enable people to experience good health in their later years. Increased lifespan, added bishop, would only be a “casual consequence” of their work, although clearly a very welcome one. Until now, experiments and research have been limited to mice and human cells. But according to Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder Rick Klausner: “We will go to people as soon as possible.”
The appointment last month of Dr. Joan Mannick as Chief Medical Officer is seen as a sign that the company is ready to do exactly that by continuing to full clinical tests of his cellular rejuvenation technology.
Mannick is seen as a leader in the field of designing and implementing clinical programs in aging biology, and yields dozens of years of experience in age-oriented medicines development, including her role as CEO and co-founder of Tornado Therapeutics. She is also an expert in navigating through the regulatory routes by what she described in one interview as “unexplored territory in clinical development”.
A science of mice and men
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The Altos Labs story started in October 2020 when a framework of top scientists gathered in Milner’s home to participate in a two-day conference on biotechnology developments for “rejuvenating” animals.
These developments have emerged from the work of Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobel Prize -winning Japanese scientist who now serves as a senior scientific adviser to Altos Labs. Yamanaka won the Nobel for his work that reprogrammed adult cells, in mice, which changed to so -called pluripotent stem cells that can be everything in the body by the introduction of four proteins – baptized “the Yamanaka factors”.
Temporary exposure to these factors essentially gives cells back to a juvenile state-breaking for anti-aging and disease research. Some studies that use the Yamanaka factors have shown that they are able to extend the old lifespan of the mouse. Similarly, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Senior Vice President of Altos Labs, uses she uses the reversal of signs of aging in old mice, such as muscle recovery and tissue recovery.
Mice are useful for this kind of research because of their genetic parable with people – they suffer many of the same diseases – while their enormously shorter lifespan make them ideal for studying disease progression and aging. But the research into mice discovered a potentially disastrous disadvantage. Excessive exposure to the Yamanaka factors may have extreme adverse effects inducing liver and intestinal failure in mice and even cancer-like tumors.
Turn the clock for 30 years
Professor Wolf Reik, director of the Altos Institute of Science in Cambridge, is at the forefront of the company’s search for a more refined “epigenetic” reset button – using human cells and embryos and mouse studies.
Reik published a study in 2022 that demonstrated the age-containing applications of Yamanaka factors. Skin cells collected from human middle -aged donors were bathed in the factors and then removed and placed in a breeding. Those who are exposed to the “Sweet Spot” of 13 days, according to their findings, had reduced their epigenetic age – a measure of biological age by levels of a process known as DNA methylation – with “about 30 years”.
In a pre-print paper Reik Co-author, published earlier this year, the scientists claimed that they had developed a mathematical model to determine the moment when pluripotent stem cells switch to more specialized cells. In the experiment they compared the transition point in Muizenembryos in Vivo and in human embryos in vitro in a laboratory grown.
By mapping the dynamics of this transition from Pluripotent to specialized cells, it must be easier to manage the process in the process.
This was always the plan. When Altos Labs was officially launched in 2022, it had just poached the top of the American scientist and drug developer Hal Barron of his role as Chief Scientific Officer at Biopharma Giant GSK as CEO.
Even with all the studies – and the hefty financial support – Altos Labs still has a long journey ahead of the leap of studies with mice and human cells to medicines that can turn back our epigenetic clock. Nevertheless, the Biotech equivalent of the Space Race is clearly in an increasingly advanced stage with the rise increasingly closer.
If Altos and his colleagues in the sector can really crack the code that allows the development of safe treatments that delay or even reverses the aging process, the implications for all humanity and the planet that we inhabit are really deep.
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