This news caught our increasingly tired eyes: a new biotech firm says they can reverse the aging process in living cells by “flipping” DNA markers, helping us stay healthier longer.
Who: Altos Labs launched in January with the mission to use “cellular rejuvenating programming” to “restore cell health and resilience to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.”
What: Four proteins transformed mature skin cells into the kind of youthful stem cells found in an embryo, MIT explains. The science is based on a 15-year-old experiment that earned Shinya Yamanaka, an advisor to the company, a Nobel Prize.
How: The rejuvenation process is still not fully understood, but since the first experiment, we’ve learned it’s possible to maintain the identity of mature cells while reprogramming the specific DNA markers impacting aging.
The idea of a “fountain of rejuvenation” has sparked excitement—and much investment in Altos—but co-founder Rick Klausner says they’re more focused on extending quality of life rather than lifespan. Altos hopes “to reverse certain diseases or disabilities, using familiar frameworks for clinical trials that are accepted by regulators and attractive to large drug companies,” Klausner tells MIT.
“There is a lot of room for average life span to increase,” Klausner tells MIT, “and that is essentially the goal of all medicine, whether curing cancer or heart disease.”
More Reading: Are aging and death inevitable? asked Laura Deming at the 2022 BIO International Convention.
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