Amazon-founder and World Richest person, Jeff Bezos has reportedly become the latest ultra rich tech entrepreneur to invest in life-extending technology.
Jeff Bezos, worth some $200bn (£145bn), and Yuri Milner, a Russian-born billionaire who made his fortune through Facebook, are backers of Altos Labs according to The MIT Technology Review.
Altos is pursuing cell reprogramming, a method of rejuvenating cells in the lab that some scientists think could be used to extend human life.
Shinya Yamanaka, who won a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of an anti-ageing technique, will be a senior scientist and chair of the company’s scientific advisory board. Yamanaka found that adding four proteins to cells could make them regress to a simpler state with embryonic properties.
The technique has since been used to reverse the ageing process of living mice by Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte who will also be joining the team. Belmonte dubbed reprogramming a potential “elixer of life.”
While Dr Yamanaka will join the team in an unpaid capacity Altos, incorporated in the UK and US earlier this year, is reportedly luring specialist scientists with annual salaries of $1m. It has plans to open labs in San Diego, Cambridge and Japan.
The news comes after Google founder Larry Page set up Calico Labs in 2013, a company which is dedicated to reprogramming. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has also made biotech investments to explore ways to prolong life.
Bezos, who is believed to be the richest man in the world, recently shot himself into space aboard a rocket ship revealing an appetite for pioneering science.
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