On 19 January 2022, co-founders Rick Klausner and Hans Bishop publicly launched an aging research initiative called Altos Labs, with $3 billion in initial investment from backers including tech investor Yuri Milner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. This is the latest in a recent surge of investment in ventures seeking to build anti-aging interventions on the back of basic research programs looking at epigenetic reprogramming. In December, cryptocurrency company Coinbase’s cofounder Brian Armstrong and venture capitalist Blake Byers founded NewLimit, an aging-focused biotech backed by an initial $105 million investment, with the University of California, San Francisco’s Alex Marson and Stanford’s Mark Davis as advisors.

The discovery of the ‘Yamanaka factors’ — four transcription factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4) that can reprogram a differentiated somatic cell into a pluripotent embryonic-like state — earned Kyoto University researcher Shinya Yamanaka a share of the Nobel prize in 2012. The finding, described in 2006, transformed stem cell research by providing a new source of embryonic stem cell (ESC)-like cells, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSCs), that do not require human embryos for their derivation. But in recent years, Yamanaka factors have also become the focus for another burgeoning area: aging research.

So-called partial reprogramming consists in applying Yamanaka factors to cells for long enough to roll back cellular aging and repair tissues but without returning to pluripotency. Several groups, including those headed by Stanford University’s Vittorio Sebastiano, the Salk Institute’s Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte and Harvard Medical School’s David Sinclair, have shown that partial reprogramming can dramatically reverse age-related phenotypes in the eye, muscle and other tissues in cultured mammalian cells and even rodent models by countering epigenetic changes associated with aging. These results have spurred interest in translating insights from animal models into anti-aging interventions. “This is a pursuit that has now become a race,” says Daniel Ives, CEO and founder of Cambridge, UK-based Shift Bioscience.

The Yamanaka factors that can reprogram cells into their embryonic-like state are at the heart of longevity research

“We’re investing in this area [because] it is one of the few interventions we know of that can restore youthful function in a diverse set of cell types,” explains Jacob Kimmel, a principal investigator at Alphabet subsidiary Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California. The zeal is shared by Joan Mannick, head of R&D at Life Biosciences, who says partial reprogramming could be potentially “transformative” when it comes to treating or even preventing age-related diseases. Life Biosciences, a startup co-founded by David Sinclair, is exploring the regenerative capacity of three Yamanaka factors (Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4).

Source: https://www.nature.com/