Retro Biosciences, a startup with $180 million in funding from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, opened the doors to a laboratory that’s working to add a decade to every human’s life.
The lab is pursuing five tracks of research simultaneously rather than just one, as a biotechnology startup traditionally would — and it’s only possible thanks to the the nine-figure check written by Retro’s lone investor, Altman, according to Bloomberg.
Retro’s chief executive Joe Betts-LaCroix has taken over an abandoned retail building in Redwood City, Calif., and filled it with shipping containers that became home to a mouse vivarium, according to Bloomberg.
“I probably spent, I don’t know, $200,000,” Betts-LaCroix told the outlet — substantially less than the $15 million a nearby developer building a similar-sized lab projected it would cost.
“I’d just rather figure out how to do it and do it in a way that works,” Betts-LaCroix said, noting that this wasn’t the only unorthodox path the facility took in its quest to give every human 10 additional years of life.
Altman — the recently-reinstated CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI — reportedly mulled funding a smaller longevity-technology-focused company around a single therapy that followed the more traditional route of chasing a singular breakthrough that one day heads into clinical trials and sell its results to a pharmaceutical or medical device giant.
However, Betts-LaCroix told Bloomberg: “Sam was willing to do something different and throw lots of money at a bunch of things in parallel.”
Since that investment two years ago, Retro has primarily operated in secrecy, opening its office and laboratories for perusal for the first time to Bloomberg this month.
The company employs 50 people, who work in small teams to find breakthroughs in autophagy — the removal of damaged cells — as well as the rejuvenation of blood plasms and a process known as partial cell reprogramming, where older cells can be treated to be turned into younger cells, per Bloomberg.
It’s a field 61-year-old Betta-LaCroix said he became interested in while obtaining his undergraduate degree in environmental geoscience at Harvard.
Up until then, he said he hated school, noting that he graduated high school with a D average, then spent the next six years living in a shared house with “musicians, artists and weirdos,” Betts-LaCroix told Bloomberg.
He paid his bills by doing electronics, hardware and software work for local businesses and occupied the rest of his time reading.
It wasn’t until he got into Harvard that he got straight A’s and fell in love with academia, per the outlet.
“It was like, ‘My God. This is a secret treasure trove,’ ” he said. “I could hang out with these brilliant professors and talk to them and learn from them. I wondered where this had been all my life.”
Now, he’s spearheading research for a type of technology he said “could extend healthy human lifestyles by years.”
“It’s an incredible gift to humanity. It’s worth working on,” he added, tamping down the most extreme claims around longevity technology that forecasts an actual “cure” for death, Bloomberg reported.
“People don’t want to die,” he added. “They will latch onto something if given hope, which is in some ways the force that I’m fighting against. The science of this realm is not the cure to your existential crisis or your desire to avoid death altogether. There are lots of things that are going to kill you.”
Representatives for Retro Biosciences did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
There has been more buzz around life-extending tech in recent months, as personalities like Bryan Johnson have made the conversation increasingly mainstream.
Johnson — an anti-aging-obsessed billionaire who made his fortune by selling payment processing firm Braintree Payment Solution to eBay for $800 million in cash — has frequently made headlines for his extreme regimen that he claims thwarts Father Time.
Part of that routine includes frequent blood plasma treatments he claims reverse his biological age of 46.
He recently took it a step further when he enlisted his then-17-year-old son as his personal “blood boy” as part of a tri-generational blood swap that also included Johnson’s 70-year-old father, Richard.
During the plasma swap in May, Johnson, his son and his dad had nearly one liter of blood drained. Talmage’s plasma was fed into Johnson’s veins and Jonson’s plasma was fed into Richard’s veins.
Though he previously stated that he won’t be swapping plasma with his child again because there were “no benefits detected,” Johnson insisted that the treatment shaved 25 years off his dad’s biological clock.
It’s not the first time using plasma as an anti-aging technique caught the attention of wellness junkies.
Scientists have literally stitched young and old mice together so they shared a circulatory system, Bloomberg reported.
The older rodents showed improvements in their cognitive function, metabolism and bone structure, while the younger subjects showed that frequent blood donation could have positive effects.
However, there is little human-based data, leaving many researchers to view plasma-swapping longevity techniques as inconclusive, according to Bloomberg.
“We have not learned enough to suggest this is a viable human treatment for anything,” Charles Brenner, a biochemist at City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg. “To me, it’s gross, evidence-free and relatively dangerous.”
Blood plasmas are traditionally given to patients experiencing trauma, burn, shock, severe liver disease and clotting deficiencies, among other conditions, according to Red Cross.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
