Retro Biosciences, a startup with $180 million in funding from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has opened the doors to a laboratory dedicated to adding a decade to the life of every human.
According to Bloomberg, the lab is pursuing five lines of research at the same time, rather than just one, as a biotechnology startup would normally do — and it’s only possible because of a nine-figure check written by Retro’s lone investor, Altman.
According to Bloomberg, Retro CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix has taken over an abandoned retail building in Redwood City, Calif., and filled it with shipping containers that have become home to a mouse vivarium.
“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.
Retro Biosciences employs 50 people who work in small groups
“I’d just rather figure out how to do it and do it in a way that works,” Betts-LaCroix said, noting that this was not the facility’s only unconventional path in its quest to give every human ten extra years of life.
Altman, the recently reinstated CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, is said to have considered funding a smaller longevity-technology-focused company around a single therapy rather than going the more traditional route of chasing a single breakthrough and selling its results to a pharmaceutical or medical device behemoth.
Betts-LaCroix told Bloomberg: “Sam was willing to do something different and throw lots of money at a bunch of things in parallel.”
Retro has primarily operated in secrecy since that investment two years ago, opening its office and laboratories for the first time to Bloomberg this month.
According to Bloomberg, the company employs 50 people who work in small groups to discover breakthroughs in autophagy — the removal of damaged cells—as well as the rejuvenation of blood plasmas and a process known as partial cell reprogramming, in which older cells can be treated to be transformed into younger cells.
“People don’t want to die”
Betta-LaCroix, 61, became interested in the field while earning his undergraduate degree in environmental geoscience at Harvard.
He had previously stated that he disliked school, noting that he graduated high school with a D average and then spent the next six years living in a shared house with “musicians, artists, and weirdos,” according to Betts-LaCroix.
He made ends meet by doing electronics, hardware, and software work for local businesses and spent his free time reading.
According to the outlet, it wasn’t until he got into Harvard that he got straight A’s and fell in love with academia.
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 leading research into a type of technology that, according to him, “could extend healthy human lifestyles by years.”
“It’s a fantastic gift to humanity.” It’s worth working on,” he added, tamping down the most extreme claims about longevity technology, which predicts a “cure” for death, according to Bloomberg.
“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.”
There has been increased interest in life-extension technology
In recent months, there has been increased interest in life-extension technology as celebrities such as Bryan Johnson have made the topic more mainstream.
Johnson, an anti-aging billionaire who made his fortune by selling payment processing firm Braintree Payment Solution to eBay for $800 million in cash, has made headlines frequently for his extreme regimen, which he claims thwarts Father Time.
His routine includes frequent blood plasma treatments, which he claims will reverse his biological age of 46.
He recently went a step further, enlisting his then-17-year-old son as his personal “blood boy” in a tri-generational blood swap that also included Johnson’s 70-year-old father, Richard.