Retro Biosciences CEO Breaks Down Three Newly-Developed Aging Interventions

Highlights

• Betts-LaCroix reveals a drug that will undergo human trials this year in Australia that targets cell waste recycling processes in neurons to alleviate Alzheimer’s disease.
• He also discusses a new way to replace old, dysfunctional brain immune cells—microglia.
• Betts-LaCroix and his team are also exploring techniques to replace old blood stem cells with younger ones to rejuvenate the immune system.

Joe Betts-LaCroix believes that aging is modifiable and addressable through biotech-related technologies. In his broad attempt to tackle aging processes, he has created a team of top-notch researchers and formed a longevity-focused biotech startup, Retro Biosciences. Intriguingly, his startup, aimed at addressing different aspects of aging, has garnered attention from some of Silicon Valley’s finest, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman. In that regard, Sam Altman has provided an initial $180 million as seed funding for Retro Biosciences, which broadly seeks to extend human life duration without disease—healthspan—by 10 years.

“Aging is the slow process of damage building up in our cells that is at first invisible,” said Joe Betts-LaCroix. “Ultimately, it starts giving rise to diseases that kill you, making life miserable, and wishing that you were dead. It robs people of their humanity.”

Betts-LaCroix is no stranger to research, having acquired biophysics-related experience from the top-tier academic institutions CalTech, MIT, and Harvard University. All the same, based on his experience in the academic realm, he says he found the bureaucratic issues that plague academia cumbersome and slow. Accordingly, he has refocused his occupational aspirations toward work in Silicon Valley, where he hopes to speed up his pursuit to prevent age-related diseases and slow the processes of aging.

“Come on. Start a company. I want to fund you,” said Sam Altman to Betts-LaCroix before the startup of Retro Biosciences, according to Betts-LaCroix.

Two Strategies Against Aging: Rejuvenating Existing Cells and Replacing Aged, Dysfunctional Cells with Younger Ones

Importantly, his startup company, Retro Biosciences, has already made some strides in its efforts to thwart the ravages of aging. Since Retro Biosciences’s inception in 2021, the company’s team has been working on multiple projects, all addressing different angles through which to prevent or slow aging. In a Montgomery Summit interview, Betts-LaCroix revealed information regarding three of these projects, each aimed at targeting aging with a unique strategy.

For starters, Betts-LaCroix said there are two key strategies for addressing aging with therapeutics. One is to rejuvenate cells where they are in the body, important for cells with essential roles, such as neurons, which, arguably, serve as the site of selfhood. In that sense, neurons are involved in memories, which relate to our sense of self, so we do not want to replace them, according to Betts-LaCroix. The second strategy is to replace old, dysfunctional cells with younger ones.

As far as a strategy Retro Biosciences has used to rejuvenate cells in place (the first strategy), Betts-LaCroix says that the company developed a drug called rtrt42, which is taken orally daily. In doing so, the drug crosses the blood-brain barrier to enter neurons where it activates a cellular system of disposing of and recycling dysfunctional proteins—a process called autophagy. According to Betts-LaCroix, autophagy gets stymied or loses functionality in the late stages of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly, Retro Biosciences has plans to start human trials with this drug later this year in Australia.

Another project that Retro Biosciences is working on focuses on generating young cells and replacing older cells with them (the second strategy). The project seeks to replace older microglia—the resident immune cells of the nervous system. In this way, Retro Biosciences has purportedly devised a way to remove microglia in a dysfunctional, inflammatory state and replace them with younger microglia.

Along those lines, in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, microglia are in a terminal, inflammatory state. Thus, Retro Biosciences aims to treat Alzheimer’s disease and perhaps other neurodegenerative conditions by replacing dysfunctional, inflammation-prone microglia with young microglia. Betts-LaCroix did not give details behind how Retro Biosciences wants to replace dysfunctional microglia with younger ones, likely because they have not been patented.

Finally, the third project that Betts-LaCroix talked about is one that again uses the second strategy described—replacing dysfunctional cells with younger ones. For this project, Retro Biosciences has come up with a technique to replace old blood stem cells with young blood stem cells. These blood stem cells produce all of the body’s blood cells—about 80% of the human cells in our body.

Betts-LaCroix said that methods used to make these new stem cells have already gone through a substantial amount of research because of decades of research on similar strategies for treating leukemia—a type of blood cancer. In that sense, it is well known that new stem cells can replace old blood stem cells.

With the technique that Retro Biosciences will use, Betts-LaCroix said proteins called Yamanaka factors that have been shown to revert certain cells to stem cells will be used to generate blood stem cells. Thus, scientists at Retro Biosciences plan to take cells out of patients, treat them with Yamanaka factors, and differentiate them into blood stem cells before reintroducing them to circulation.

As for what conditions Retro Biosciences will use the young blood stem cells to treat, Betts-LaCroix says the technique will treat specific blood diseases like aplastic anemia for starters. This is because health authorities require that new treatment methods undergoing testing address specific diseases. Ultimately, though, Betts-LaCroix said that replacing old blood stem cells with younger ones will be used for age-related immune dysfunction. The overarching goal will then be to prevent older people aged 90 and above from dying of common sicknesses like the flu. With this technique, Betts-LaCroix and the scientists at Retro Biosciences hope to rejuvenate older adults’ immune systems.

Retro Biosciences Is Researching Multiple Strategies that Address Aging

Needless to say, by taking on multiple projects at once, Betts-LaCroix and his startup biotech company, Retro Biosciences, have ambitiously aimed high to address the ravages of aging. With all of the ongoing projects at the company, it may come as no surprise that he and his team are utilizing AI to develop new therapies. This is because mentally keeping track of thousands of proteins interacting at once, which happens in many biological processes, is simply not within the capacity of a human, according to Betts-LaCroix. Accordingly, he believes that computer-based AI will lead to more effective therapeutics, discovered at a faster rate, than those arising from human research. Interestingly, Betts-LaCroix and his colleagues at Retro Biosciences already have at least three therapeutic strategies to address aging as mentioned during his interview. These aging intervention strategies are already beginning to undergo testing even though the company was started in just 2021. According to Betts-LaCroix, it typically takes eight to 10 years for biotech startups to develop just one type of technology. These developments support the notion that Betts-LaCroix is staying true to his desire for speed in research and development with his startup company, Retro Biosciences.