Amazon founder and the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has hired a team of scientists in an effort to develop immortality.
The news came as Bezos was revealed to be piling $3 billion into an anti-ageing company called 'Alto Labs'. The start-up firm only launched on Wednesday and will have as its focus the goal of researching and developing technologies that can reverse or halt the ageing process.
The Alto Labs form has already recruited the former chief scientist at GlaxoSmithKline, Hal Barron, along with other senior figures in the pharmaceutical industry, including Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, the 2012 Nobel prize winner whose worked focused on stem cell research, and Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel prize winner in chemistry won for the development of the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
The company stated on their website:
"Altos will be initially based in the US in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego, and in the UK in Cambridge. The company will also have significant collaborations in Japan. Set within these geographies, activity will be organized across the Institutes of Science and the Institute of Medicine. The Altos Institutes of Science will pursue deep scientific questions and integrate their findings into one collaborative research effort. The Altos Institute of Medicine will capture knowledge generated about cell health and programming to develop transformative medicines."
While Barron himself said:
"I am deeply honored to have been offered this once in a lifetime opportunity to lead such a unique company with a transformative mission to reverse disease. It's clear from work by Shinya Yamanaka, and many others since his initial discoveries, that cells have the ability to rejuvenate, resetting their epigenetic clocks and erasing damage from a myriad of stressors."
"These insights, combined with major advances in a number of transformative technologies, inspired Altos to reimagine medical treatments where reversing disease for patients of any age is possible."
The company is expected to focus on what is known as 'biological reprogramming', which seeks to rejuvenate cells after they have already developed. It is hoped, by some, that this could stop diseases such as dementia and cancer.
[Based on reporting by: Futurism]
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