Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

How This Company Plans to Make You Younger

11 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, Speaker A contrasts the typical biotech startup model—discovering a promising molecule and raising money to test it—with Speaker B’s company, which was founded on a broader principle: extending the healthy portion of human life by any means necessary. The company has explored six different scientific directions and identified three that show enough promise to move into clinical development. The first is an orally available drug designed to restore cellular recycling of old and damaged proteins, targeting proteostasis. The other two approaches are cellular‑replacement therapies: they generate young cells ex vivo and transplant them into the body to replace older cells where needed. The discussion highlights the company’s mission‑driven, multi‑track strategy versus conventional single‑target biotech ventures.

Chapters

So most biotech companies, some scientist in a lab has found this interesting molecule. We're gonna raise some money to see how far we can push this thing. Either it works or it doesn't. You guys came out taking like a few shots on goal, and I mean, that was very much on purpose, right?
You can found a company on different premises, and in our case, the founding principle is this extending the healthy portion of human life, and the mechanism is any means necessary. Yeah. So we've explored probably pretty deeply 6 different directions to achieve that. We found 3 of them that we're excited enough about that we're taking them all the way to the clinic now. The first is an orally available drug that restores the cellular recycling of old and broken proteins. The other 2 are more strictly based on cellular replacement. Uh, so we can generate young cells outside the body and then replace older cells inside the body, uh, by putting them where they need to go.