Sam Altman's retro bioscience aims to extend lifespan by 10 years

But computers aren't his only passion. Over the past three years, Altman has secretly spent considerable time and money on a more biological type of moonshot that attempts to reprogram the human body.

In 2021, during a relative “lull” between becoming CEO of OpenAI and announcing ChatGPT to the world, Altman launched a $180 million side project. The startup's goal, called Retro Biosciences, is simple but extremely ambitious. It's about adding his 10 years of good health and joy to the end of our lives.

To accomplish this, Altman worked with Joe Betts, a Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Caltech-trained scientist, biophysicist, and computer whiz who once created the world's smallest personal computer. I teamed up with LaCroix. Although Betts-LaCroix is ​​not trained in geriatrics, he has been a longtime advocate of the harder sciences and “deep biology” of longevity through his nonprofit Health Promotion Foundation.

To the casual observer, biohacking may seem like Altman's quirky pet project, a distraction from his daily life immersed in the general business of technology. However, Retro His Bioscience actually fits very well into Altman's futuristic worldview.

As a doomsday preparer who says he has a stash of guns, money, and land for any worst scenario, it's no surprise that Altman is concerned about society's future and focused on identifying threats to our existence. He also feels strongly that he is the one who can help solve all these existential problems and future-proof our world.

Is this exactly what happens when you get rich and powerful in Silicon Valley and become convinced that you can solve everything? Or is it Altman's toughness, sense of responsibility, and self-defense mentality as a prepper that leads him, along with Chip and his AI, to work on both the future of fusion energy and the longevity of humanity? ?

Whatever drives him, surprisingly, this slightly longer period of time he imagines our bodies is actually plausible.

Bet big on 3 trending anti-aging techniques

Retro Biosciences is located about 30 miles south of OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters, where ChatGPT was born. In true Silicon Valley startup fashion, it's closer to the campuses of Meta University, Apple University, and Stanford University than Golden City.

The company's philosophy is pure Silicon Valley: “More like a pirate than a navy.” The headquarters is a warehouse-like office filled with bold, bright murals of plants and glass beakers. The laboratory is a series of shipping containers that they assembled and ventilated.desk Employees sit on a platform high enough to peer through narrow barred windows. The whole aesthetic is “move fast and break things”, but that's for longevity.

Since the shipping container experiment began in July 2021, Retro has divided its ambitions into three buckets. Essentially, like the startup incubator Y Combinator (which Altman once ran), Retro is making individual bets on what will work to extend human lifespans.

Eating nuts at her desk, Betts LaCroix told Business Insider that the retro model “breaks all the rules of early-stage biotech, which is to focus on a specific platform or target and go all in.” . In it. ” Here’s where they’re placing their bets.

1. autophagy

The built-in recycling processes that keep our cells healthy and active can (theoretically) be tweaked with a pill, making perhaps three areas of research that could provide a “quick” solution to aging. It is the most mature research area in the field. Currently, the closest thing to a drug that improves cellular efficiency is either rapamycin or metformin. These two existing drugs (kidney transplant and diabetes treatments, respectively) are expected to extend lifespan, and some biohackers are already using them off-label as DIY aging interventions. However, to date, there are still no drugs that directly, definitively, and formally target this cellular housekeeping problem.

2. Cell reprogramming

One of the trendiest ideas floating around in longevity science today. This is also logistically difficult. The idea is to make old cells behave young again by “reprogramming” them into a slightly younger state using four well-known Yamanaka factors (Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka , discovered that this was possible and won the Nobel Prize in 2012). , it has been difficult to achieve this type of modification in a way that does not potentially cause cancer or other health problems.

Here, Betts LaCroix imagines starting very slowly – extracting cells from people's ears and knee joints, Partially They will be reprogrammed to slightly slow aging and then reinserted into humans once it is deemed safe to treat.

“Don't even confront that person head-on in the first place,” he said. “Take cells from their bodies to program them. Make sure you're okay.”

For example, Retro could try more advanced experiments if these experiments could help with age-related issues such as hearing loss or joint mobility.

3. plasma treatment

A concept that seems the most Dracula-ish of all. Dr. Betts-LaCroix points to a “promising rejuvenating” study conducted in mice by diluting their plasma with saline. (This seems to be more effective than simply giving young blood to old mice.)

Aging mice that undergo plasma dilution improve a variety of age-related problems. This procedure reduces inflammation, improves muscle and liver health, and promotes brain cell formation. Early studies in humans, including some ongoing at Retro, suggest the technology may work for us, beyond rodents.

CEO says Altman is very hands-on at Retro.bio

That's a monumental mission. Altman believes so strongly that he works on it literally all the time.

Betts LaCroix said she meets with Altman once a week to discuss the successes and failures of Retro Labs' experiments and to discuss strategy. Somehow, in the midst of all the chip manufacturing plans and announcements of new AI tools like Sora, Altman consistently shows up at this conference.

“The board is myself and Sam Altman, and he's a very rational and technically competent person,” Betts LaCroix told BI.

“I don't have to wait three months for a quarterly board meeting to create a big slide deck and have everyone nervous and sweaty wondering, 'Should I actually show this data?'” shows everything, warts and all. ”

Altman is in a longevity race with Bezos, Thiel and other billionaires

These days, it seems almost mandatory for a tech titan like Altman to invest in some form of life extension.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is widely believed to have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the highly secretive San Diego-based Altos Research Institute, which collects some of the brightest and most decorated longevity scientists from universities around the world. I've pulled out some of them. Fully funded at $3 billion by Bezos, Yuri Milner and others, Altos may be the best-funded institute for longevity research.

Billionaire Peter Thiel famously agreed to have his body cryogenically frozen in order to bring him back to life after death. He also donated cash to Aubrey de Grey, who promoted the idea that we might soon be able to “escape” the speed of death.

And German billionaire Christian Angermayer, chairman of Cambrian Bio, whose various start-ups are focused on developing a wide range of drugs and treatments to improve aging, includes Includes companies aimed at keeping women's ovaries young and extending their fertility.

Betts LaCroix sees what Retro is doing more as a moral mission than a clever business model to increase a billionaire's net worth.

“Producing more health is a clear public good,” he said.

But not all experts agree. Imposing an extra 10 years on the bodies of the richest and most privileged among us will reduce health disparities and help us all achieve a little more by implementing more systemic changes that lead to improvements. Some wonder if it should really take precedence over finding a way to live longer. The social, mental and emotional health of all of us. There are things we already know to be very effective at extending human lifespans, such as exercise, diet, faith, and social support. (Presumably, the billionaire class already adheres to these well-known pillars of health, which can extend a human's healthy lifespan by about 10 years.)

“If gerontologists were able to extend people's lives by five or 10 years by taking a pill, the impact on the business world, the insurance industry, the medical industry and social security would be a tsunami,” says biogerontologist Daniel.・Mr. Promislow stated. Who will lead the dog aging project, he previously told BI.

Could Altman's approach, which has worked so well in unearthing some of Silicon Valley's blockbuster startups, win him in the big race for products that extend the lifespan of people's bodies? Retro could get there first and unlock a huge windfall. hundreds of billions of dollars. But no one knows yet who is in the lead. It's still too early to call winners and losers in this industry.

Matt Buckley, one of Retro's co-founders, recently told Bloomberg that Altman's money will likely keep the company running until about 2030. After that, it will need to consider going public or finding more investors. By then, Betts-LaCroix says, maybe, just maybe, we'll have some of the first breakthroughs, similar to what's happened recently with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

“In 2000, I was like, 'I hope I can survive the era when AI starts to permeate society,'” Betts-Lacroix said.

The time has come.

“And I did it! I'm alive,” he said.