4 Private Longevity Research Companies (Updated 2023)

1. Altos Labs

Based in Los Altos, California, Altos Labs is a biotechnology company that is developing cellular rejuvenation programming to promote healthy cells in the human body and revive cells damaged by environmental stresses. The company is also establishing operations in San Diego and the UK, and is working on collaborations in Japan.

Launched after a US$3 billion investment round in early 2022, Altos Labs reportedly has the backing of big-name investors, including Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Jeff Bezos. Altos Labs CEO Hal Barron is the former president of research and development and chief scientific officer for the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (LSE:GSK,NYSE:GSK).

The company has stacked its team with some of the world’s leading scientists, including: Jennifer Doudna, the co-winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry for the development of the gene-editing tool CRISPR; and Shinya Yamanaka, the winner of the 2012 Nobel prize in medicine for stem cell research. "Altos seeks to decipher the pathways of cellular rejuvenation programming to create a completely new approach to medicine, one based on the emerging concepts of cellular health," said Rick Klausner, chief scientist and founder of Altos Labs and the former director of the National Cancer Institute.

2. Retro Biosciences

Headquartered in San Francisco, Retro Biosciences is a biotechnology firm specializing in cellular reprogramming, autophagy and plasma-inspired therapeutics with a mission to increase healthy human lifespans by 10 years. “By focusing on the cellular driver of aging, Retro will produce therapeutics eventually capable of multi-disease prevention,” according to the company.

One of the newest longevity research companies, Retro has put together an all-star team headed by CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix. Betts-LaCroix was a co-founder of OQO, the company that created the then-smallest personal Windows PC in 2000; he also founded the Health Extension Foundation. Retro co-founder Sheng Ding is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, while co-founder Matt Buckley was formerly a systems integration engineer with life science firm Illumina, as well as a scientist with Global Biologics Development at Bayer Pharmaceuticals.

Of its three main areas of focus, Retro's cellular reprogramming work is the most advanced, and the company plans to work towards a clinical proof-of-concept over the next four years.

In April 2022, Retro Biosciences raised US$180 million in venture funding from undisclosed investors. The money is expected to take its cellular reprogramming work through clinical proof-of-concept.

3. Elevian

Biotech company Elevian is developing drugs that can restore the regenerative capacity of various tissues in the human body. These medicines have the potential to treat and prevent multiple diseases associated with aging.

While working at the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, the company found that treatment with the circulating factor GDF11 can regenerate the heart and the brain, as well as muscle and other human tissues. Due to this discovery, Elevian has exclusive worldwide rights to Harvard's patent GDF11 portfolio.

Elevian is developing medicines that use the GDF11 pathway to target a number of age-related diseases, including strokes, diet-induced obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart failure and Alzheimer's disease. Its lead drug candidate (recombinant human GDF11) has demonstrated efficacy in preclinical models for addressing these medical needs.

“We’re interested in proteins like GDF11 that are excreted into the bloodstream because those can cause changes throughout the body,” Dr. Mark Allen, CEO of Elevian, told the New York Times. “And those are the kind of changes we want.”

4. Insilico Medicine

Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine is a clinical-stage biotech company harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), big data analysis and genomics for researching aging and developing medicines that target cancers, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, central nervous system diseases and age-related diseases.

Insilico's mission involves providing AI platforms that can help identify and develop new drug candidates for untreated diseases and then predict how well those treatments may perform in clinical trials. In November 2022, Insilico signed a strategic research collaboration with Sanofi (NASDAQ:SNY) worth up to US$1.2 billion, with its value depending on certain milestones being met.

The company has a large pipeline of drug candidates targeting a variety of conditions. Its most advanced program is for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is a type of chronic scarring lung disease characterized by a progressive and irreversible decline in lung function. In January 2023, Insilico released positive top line data from this clinical trial.

"Topline data from our Phase 1 study of INS018_055 demonstrate the ability of our Pharma.AI platform to discover novel targets and design novel molecules with a high level of translatability to human biology,” stated founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov.

“This lead program is paving the way for a new era of drug discovery and development that utilizes next generation AI to identify novel targets and generate novel drugs to treat diseases requiring regular peroral drug administration for the entire lifetime with very high safety requirements.”