A $3bn bet on finding the fountain of youth

livemint.com:

the prolongation of life is a field that seems particularly attractive to the man (and it usually is a man) who otherwise has everything. The founders of Altos do, though, seem deadly serious about what they are up to. Looking at discoveries in biology made over 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 of cellular ageing.

They have also recruited a star-studded scientific cast to help them track that answer down. Illnesses potentially in their cross-hairs include cognitive disorders and neurodegeneration, diabetes 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 technological pies, in a series of covid-escaping walks in Los Altos, a hilly, well-heeled suburb on the edge of Silicon Valley. They then recruited Mr Bishop, formerly boss of GRAIL, a cancer-detection company, to be the business brains.

The two findings around which the firm is built are Yamanaka transcription factors and the integrated stress-response (ISR) pathway. Yamanaka factors, discovered in 2006 by Yamanaka Shinya of Kyoto University, are four gene-regulating proteins which serve, in essence, to return a cell to factory settings. In this case “factory settings" means a state known as pluripotency that is enjoyed by embryonic stem cells.