02-17-2022, 03:03 PM
If they could turn back time: how tech billionaires are trying to reverse the ageing process
![[Image: 5000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=forma...a4c111379e]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e5815536c806ba780583a159c7a0a86984ad04d3/0_0_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f26434edb742068c90b0bba4c111379e)
In the summer of 2019, months before the word “coronavirus” entered the daily discourse, Diljeet Gill was double-checking data from his latest experiment. He was investigating what happens when old human skin cells are “reprogrammed” – a process used in labs around the world to turn adult cells (heart, brain, muscle and the like) – into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate.
Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.”
A lot has happened since then. Last summer, Reik resigned as the director of the Babraham Institute to lead a new UK institute being built by Altos Labs, a contender for the most flush startup in history. Backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to the tune of $3bn (£2.2bn), Altos has signed up a dream team of scientists, Gill and numerous Nobel laureates among them. They will start work in the spring at two labs in the US and one in the UK, with substantial input from researchers in Japan. Their aim is to rejuvenate human cells, not with an eye on immortality – as some reports have claimed – but to stave off the diseases of old age that inexorably drive us to the grave.
“This is a field whose time has come,” says Prof Dame Linda Partridge at University College London’s Institute of Healthy Ageing. “I think what Altos will do is hugely accelerate the process of finding out whether it is going to deliver or not. We need to see some clinical success stories.”
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Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.”
A lot has happened since then. Last summer, Reik resigned as the director of the Babraham Institute to lead a new UK institute being built by Altos Labs, a contender for the most flush startup in history. Backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to the tune of $3bn (£2.2bn), Altos has signed up a dream team of scientists, Gill and numerous Nobel laureates among them. They will start work in the spring at two labs in the US and one in the UK, with substantial input from researchers in Japan. Their aim is to rejuvenate human cells, not with an eye on immortality – as some reports have claimed – but to stave off the diseases of old age that inexorably drive us to the grave.
“This is a field whose time has come,” says Prof Dame Linda Partridge at University College London’s Institute of Healthy Ageing. “I think what Altos will do is hugely accelerate the process of finding out whether it is going to deliver or not. We need to see some clinical success stories.”
- More -