Following a stint in the media limelight championing a renewed space race, Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos has set his sights on getting in on the ground floor with a biotech startup’s anti-aging technology. Alto Labs has been gestating a biological reprogramming technology meant to rejuvenate cells. Scientists have noted that there’s potential for life-saving applications, body revitalization, and even the extension of the human lifespan.
In addition to catching the eye of Bezos, who previously provided financing for a similar effort through Unity Technologies, Alto Labs has attracted many investors and garnered $270 million in fundraising. The company was developed earlier this year following a two-day scientific conference headed by tech mogul and investor Yuri Milner. Alto is now recruiting top minds in the science field by offering salaries to the tune of $1 million and promising carte blanche for research methodology. These employees will likely be deployed to planned institutes in the U.S., U.K., and Japan.
The technology in question, known as reprogramming, functions through “adding proteins to a cell which essentially instruct it to revert to a stem-cell-like state,” as explained by MIT Tech Review. Shinya Yamanaka earned a joint Nobel Prize in 2012 for demonstrating this technique on mice. He will become a part of Alto Labs by chairing its scientific advisory board.
