| Company type | Inc. |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2022 |
Key people |
|
Number of employees | 500  |
| Website | altoslabs |
Altos Labs, Inc. is an American biotechnology research company. Altos Labs' goal is to develop life extension therapies that can halt or reverse the human aging process. Specialized cell therapies based on induced pluripotent stem cells are to be developed for this purpose. The company was started in 2022.
Altos Labs was formally started on 19 January 2022. [1] The name Altos Labs is based on the city of Los Altos in California. [1] The idea for Altos Labs originated with cell biologist and entrepreneur Richard D. Klausner, who co-founded the company with Hans Bishop.
In 2021, Altos Labs was registered in the United States and the United Kingdom. [2] It will operate out of California (U.S.) and Cambridge (U.K.), with some work performed in Japan. [3]
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 and his wife Julia. The foundation supports existing and future philanthropic projects in fundamental sciences. [4] 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.
Altos Labs raised US$3 billion in a funding round from investors in January 2022. [2] It is said to be the best funded biotech start-up to date. [3] Investors reportedly include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos [5] and ARCH Venture Partners founder Robert Nelsen. [6]
Salaries for principal investigators at Altos Labs may be ten times higher than at comparable research institutions. [7]
Altos Labs plans to establish research facilities in Cambridge, the San Francisco Bay Area, and in San Diego as a first step. [8]
Atypical of a private company, the initial focus will be on basic research without immediate prospects of a commercially viable product. [1]
In January 2022, the company's president, Hans Bishop, argued, that Altos Labs was working on increasing the "healthspan" of humans and that longevity extension would only be "an accidental consequence". [3]
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American businessman, media proprietor and investor. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. He is the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of about US$199.1 billion as of March 2, 2024. He was also the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Life extension is the concept of extending the human lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled biological limit of around 125 years. Several researchers in the area, along with "life extensionists", "immortalists", or "longevists", postulate that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition (agerasia). The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
Venrock is a venture capital firm formed in 1969 to build upon the successful investing activities of the Rockefeller family that began in the late 1930s. It has offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, and Boston, Massachusetts.
Eternal youth is the concept of human physical immortality free of ageing. The youth referred to is usually meant to be in contrast to the depredations of aging, rather than a specific age of the human lifespan. Eternal youth is common in mythology, and is a popular theme in fiction.
David Andrew Sinclair is an Australian-American biologist and academic known for his research on aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and is the co-director of its Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He was the president of the non-profit Academy for Health & Lifespan Research until resigning on March 13, 2024.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to life extension:
Illumina, Inc. is an American biotechnology company, headquartered in San Diego, California, and it serves more than 155 countries. Incorporated on April 1, 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. The company provides a line of products and services that serves the sequencing, genotyping and gene expression, and proteomics markets.
The Methuselah Foundation is an American-based global non-profit organization based in Springfield, Virginia, with a declared mission to "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. The organization was originally incorporated by David Gobel in 2001 as the Performance Prize Society, a name inspired by the British governments Longitude Act, which offered monetary rewards for anyone who could devise a portable, practical solution for determining a ship's longitude.
The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that does research programs and public relations work for the application of regenerative medicine to aging. It was founded in 2009, located in Mountain View, California, USA. The organization publishes its reports annually.
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Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group, and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Byju's, Facebook, Wish, and many other enterprises.
Calico Life Sciences LLC is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and with a focus on biotechnology their goal is to increase the understanding of the biology that controls human aging, attempting to devise interventions that may enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.
Thomas Austin Alberg was an American lawyer and businessman, founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group, and a director of Amazon.com from 1996 to 2019. In addition to investing in many high tech startups, he was one of the earliest investors in Amazon. At Madrona, some of Alberg's investments included Impinj, a RFID technology start-up, online real estate brokerage Redfin, business management as-a-service provider Apptio and Isilon Systems, a storage software provider which was later acquired by the Emc Corporation.
Lev Binzumovich Leviev is an Israeli-Russian entrepreneur and investor, founder of international venture capital firm LVL1, co-founder of Russia's largest social network VK.com and the Selectel data center network.
Laura Deming is a venture capitalist whose work focuses on life extension, and using biological research to reduce or reverse the effects of aging.
BioViva is an American biotechnology company, based in Bainbridge Island, Washington, researching treatments to interfere in the ageing process in humans.
Unity Biotechnology is a publicly traded American biotechnology company that develops drugs that target senescent cells.
This timeline lists notable events in the history of research into senescence or biological aging, including the research and development of life extension methods, brain aging delay methods and rejuvenation.
Bezos Expeditions is an American investment firm based in Mercer Island, Washington. It serves as a family office for Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos by managing his personal investments. The firm invests both in early and late stage ventures of companies in different sectors.
