San Francisco biotech company Retro Biosciences is raising $1 billion to support its mission to extend human life by 10 years through artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The company plans to advance its first drug to clinical trials this year.

Retro Biosciences' seed funding was provided by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, with an amount of $180 million, and Altman will also invest additional funds in this round of Series A financing. The company is currently in talks with family offices, venture capital institutions, sovereign wealth funds, and a US "hyperscale" data center, which will provide it with the computing power needed to run AI models to accelerate drug development and testing.

Retro Biosciences has developed a custom AI model in collaboration with OpenAI that can design proteins to temporarily convert ordinary cells into stem cells, thereby reversing the cellular aging process. The company plans to use the financing to fund clinical trials of three drugs, including a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease, which will undergo early-stage research in Australia this year. In addition, Retro Biosciences is also developing drugs to rejuvenate blood and brain cells.

CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix is a close friend of Altman and has sold several companies to Google and biotech company Recursion. He said his goal is to "reduce human suffering." He told the Financial Times: "Currently, if someone has Alzheimer's disease, no matter how many resources you have, whether it's Joe Biden, Elon Musk or anyone else, you can't cure the disease with money."

IT Home noted that Silicon Valley technology leaders, including Google co-founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, have invested in companies in recent years that aim to extend human lifespan or healthspan (the number of years people can live healthily). Google's drug development startup Isomorphic Labs also plans to advance an AI-designed drug into clinical trials by the end of this year. Bezos-backed Altos completed the largest biotech financing ever in 2022, raising $3 billion.

Bates-Lacroix said Altos has an "outstanding team" and "admirable long-term research goals", but he and Altman both came from the technology accelerator Y Combinator, so they prefer a "fast-paced, action-oriented, goal-oriented" way of working. The financing was led by Italian financier Sandro Salsano, who has joined the Retro Biosciences board of directors.

Retro Biosciences plans to speed up drug development, aiming to significantly shorten the current average drug development cycle of 10 to 15 years. "Our goal is to launch the first drug in the 2020s," Bates-Lacroix said. The company believes that the exclusive cooperation with OpenAI will accelerate this process. The two parties are working together to develop language models based on biological data, which can suggest ways to improve cell reprogramming and thus reduce the effects of aging.

Bates-Lacroix also mentioned that there is another "underlying motivation" for working with the AI company valued at $157 billion, which is to bring biotech into OpenAI's field. "When your model can make discoveries that humans cannot make independently, you know you are making progress on the road to general artificial intelligence (AGI). "

Retro Biosciences' first clinical trial drug candidate is a pill that can restore the recycling process inside cells. The failure of this process is associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is the most common dementia in the world, with more than 55 million patients. However, existing drugs can only slow down the progression of the disease, but cannot reverse the disease process. The next two drugs will be cell therapies, one of which treats Alzheimer's disease by replacing microglia in the brain. Bates-Lacroix called this plan "a bit sci-fi but very promising." The third drug replaces stem cells in the blood with younger stem cells.
"If you were 85 and had this treatment, you could replace your blood stem cells with age-zero stem cells, and those cells would proliferate and make all your blood," Bates-Lacroix explained. "Basically, that would mean 80 percent of the cells in your body would be restored to the state they were at age zero."

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