From space to the afterlife. Jeff Bezos, owner and creator of Amazon, has communicated that there will be a turning point for his Altos Labs. The startup was created by Bezos, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and former US National Cancer Institute executive Richard Klausner in October 2020. The company's purpose is to study the cell regeneration and thanks to this he means fight against aging human. The project is very ambitious and aims, at least in the aspirations of its protagonists, to prolong human life by fifty years.
The new pact with the devil, in fact, assumes not only to live longer but above all to do so with a youthful body. To make the so-called qualitative leap, Bezos announced that he has hired Hal Barron, an internationally renowned pharmaceutical manager and so far employee of the British multinational GlaxoSmithKline, as executive director. This news, which in itself would already be enough to explain the leap in quality intended by Bezos, however, was not the most important of the day: the American billionaire has announced that he will invest three billion dollars in research and development plans futures of the startup. As? Even through the stamina cells.
These plans will target the cellular reprogramming, a technique that has so far only been tested on single cells, which for many scholars represents the key to being able to rejuvenate human beings, cure tumors, which are diseases connected to aging, and generally lengthen life expectancy.
Since last September Altos Labs has embarked on a pharaonic recruitment campaign (the proposed salaries are similar to those of football players) to be able to hire the best researchers on the planet: one of these is Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and the luminary of stem cells Shin'ya Yamanaka, Nobel Prize for medicine in 2012, who will provide his advice free of charge. These high-profile international names have served, as well as for the leap in quality, also to reassure Bezos' critics who thought it was another media stunt with little scientific foundation behind it.
