Startups come and startups go. But few startups start with $3bn in the bank. Yet that is the fortunate position in which Altos Labs finds itself…. And, even at $3bn, its proposed product might be thought cheap at the price. For the alchemy its founders, Rick Klausner, Hans Bishop and Yuri Milner, hope one day to offer the world is an elixir of life.
The two findings around which the firm is built are Yamanaka transcription factors and the integrated stress-response (ISR) pathway.
Yamanaka factors, discovered in 2006 by Yamanaka Shinya of Kyoto University, are four gene-regulating proteins which serve, in essence, to return a cell to factory settings.
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If a source of cellular stress is detected—be it external, such as oxygen or nutrient-deprivation, or viral infection; or internal, such as an accumulation of misfolded proteins or the activation of a potentially cancer-causing gene—the ISR switches on an emergency program to reset protein manufacturing.
If this does not clear the problem, it then presses the self-destruct button, blowing up the cell it is in, in a process called apoptosis, to stop it becoming a locus of disease.
These two discoveries offer, in the founders’ view, ways to bring sick cells back to health by resetting malfunctioning isr pathways, and to give healthy cells that are getting on a bit in years a tonic.
