Altos Labs launches with $3 billion for cellular rejuvenation

The biotech company Altos Labs has launched with an unprecedented $3 billion in funding and an equally ambitious goal: using cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health and reverse disease, injury, and disabilities. Altos will be led by Hal Barron, who is currently president of R&D and chief scientific officer at GlaxoSmithKline. Barron will start his new job Aug. 1. Altos’s chief scientist is Rick Klausner, an entrepreneur and former director of the US National Cancer Institute. The new firm’s board includes luminaries such as the Nobel laureates Frances Arnold and Jennifer Doudna. It will be organized as three Altos Institutes of Science—in San Francisco, San Diego, and Cambridge, England—intended to operate like academic labs and the Altos Institute of Medicine, which will capture the labs’ knowledge about cell health and programming to develop medicines. “Altos offers a whole new research and development model targeted to the oldest of human problems, slowing and even ultimately reversing the effects of disease,” Arnold says in a press release announcing the firm’s launch.