Crypto billionaire pours millions into anti-aging startup

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Since humans have existed, we have wanted to live forever. Well, some of us.

Today, six centuries after Ponce de León’s search for the legendary fountain of youth, Silicon Valley is waging a veritable war on aging. A new entrant into the space is NewLimit, led by crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong and bioengineer turned venture capitalist Blake Byers.

In a press release last week, the founders acknowledged that their mission to cure aging is “incredibly ambitious”, but explained that the challenge is “precisely why we feel the urgency to start today” . They are not getting any younger.

Co-founder Brian Armstrong is the 38-year-old co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. After earning a master’s degree in computer science from Rice University, he worked in software engineering before entering the Y combinator startup accelerator, where he secured an investment in the company that would become Coinbase. The company, which allows users to trade cryptocurrency, was launched in 2012. After great commercial success, Armstrong signed the Giving Pledge in 2018, promising to donate the majority of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Today, his estimated net worth hovers around $ 10 billion.

Blake Byers, who joins Brian Armstrong as co-founder of NewLimit, holds a PhD from Stanford. in bioengineering and spent 9 years as a general partner at Google Ventures investing in biotechnology.

The duo behind NewLimit intentionally focus on improving the quality of life; their goal is “not to lengthen lifespan but” lifespan “” and they emphasize the potential of epigenetics, the study of when and why certain genes are expressed.

The entirety of the genetic code is present in every human cell, but much of it is inactive, which makes sense, as you wouldn’t want toenail genes to be active in your eyeball, for example. NewLimit seeks to understand the tiny cellular signals that turn genes on and off in an attempt to reverse epigenetic signals that cause aging. Byers and Armstrong point to Nobel Prize-winning research, published in 2006, which uses just four proteins (called “Yamanaka factors”) to reprogram aged cells into immature cells – creating stem cells, the undifferentiated cells common in embryos, to from the plain old tissue in your body right now. As the founders said, “You can scrape a skin cell from your arm and reprogram it into a brain cell.” NewLimit seeks to explore epigenetic tools to “restore the regenerative potential we all had when we were younger, but somehow lost.” “

“You can scratch a skin cell on your arm and reprogram it into a brain cell. “

As NewLimit seeks a founding team, it emphasizes real-world impact, stating that it is decidedly not an “academic-oriented organization where papers are more important than products” .

The duo join a growing trend of wealthy tech executives launching a privately funded war on aging. The list of epigenetics-focused anti-aging companies is long and growing. One such company is Calico Labs, announced in 2013 by Google co-founder Larry Page. Another longevity company is Altos Labs, whose founders are Jeff Bezos and Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner. There’s AgeX Therapeutics, Turn Bio, Shift Bioscience, and Retro Bioscience, backed by a billionaire 2017, all of which are pursuing epigenetic therapies to change aging as we know it.

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is enthusiastically funding parabiosis, blood transfusions of young to old organisms that have been shown, in limited studies, to rejuvenate the nervous system in rodents. The practice remains controversial and the FDA warns against it.

The rise of private science startups comes as federal research funding steadily declines and research funding changes, so do the motivations for research. “The practice of science in the 21st century is shaped less by national priorities or peer review groups than by the particular preferences of individuals with huge sums of money to give,” Steven Edwards wrote for the American Association for the Advancement. science.

“Science in the 21st century is shaped less by peer review groups and more by individuals with huge sums of money.

An editorial in the leading science journal Nature warned of the downsides of science philanthropy, including the potential to ‘skew research’ towards trendy projects and move away from crucial but ‘less fashionable fields. “.

Another concern is fairness. As NewLimit and other startups seek to push the boundaries of biology, will their advances be accessible to the non-rich? Co-founders Armstrong and Byers offer vague solace, writing that “every revolutionary product, from cell phones to electric cars, began with breakthroughs in basic science, which led to expensive early prototypes. But the cost of these products has fallen over time, to the point of becoming available to everyone. “

For better or for worse, leaders in Silicon Valley are programming the human genome in addition to computers. NewLimit has more than $ 100 million in funding, saying “capital will not be the limiting factor for the next few years.”

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