Retro Biosciences

What it is

Retro Biosciences was founded in 2021/22 with an initial $180M investment from Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) and an explicit 10-year brief to add 10 healthy years to human lifespan.

Programmes

• Cellular reprogramming — partial Yamanaka-factor approaches to reset cellular age.
• Autophagy enhancement — drug discovery on the autophagic flux pathway.
• Plasma factor discovery — identifying youth-associated proteins in human plasma proteomics, following on from Wyss-Coray-style work.

Notable

• Built in stealth for the first 18 months.
• Concentrated talent including significant overlap with the rejuvenation field’s academic core.

State

Pre-clinical; no public clinical-stage candidates as of writing.

Why it matters

Retro is one of the better-funded private bets that partial reprogramming and related modalities can be translated into therapeutics on a faster timescale than the academic mainstream suggests. The 10-year framing makes it a useful comparator to longer-horizon shops like Altos.

Related entries

Partial reprogramming, Autophagy machinery, Tony Wyss-Coray.