Exclusive: A New Bid To Control The Genome

Lada Nuzhna and team want to fix you for good

Lada Nuzhna is impatient.

At 21, she co-founded Impetus Grants. This non-profit, backed by wealthy pro-science philanthropists like James Fickel, Jed McCaleb, Juan Benet and Vitalik Buterin, sought to speed up longevity research. Starting in 2021, it awarded grants to high-risk, high-potential research with the promise of cutting checks quickly and little bureaucratic overhead. About 150 efforts were fired up with the money going to new tools, new science and clinical trials at a time when neither the U.S. government nor typical investors were backing much in the way of aging technology. “We raised money to back crazy science, knowing that most of the projects would fail,” Nuzhna says. “But we also knew the ones that succeeded would be a big deal.”

Now, at 26, Nuzhna has her next act. It’s a biotech start-up called General Control. The company, backed by age1 and Fifty Years to the tune of $5.5 million, has been operating in secret since its founding in 2024, and it arrives with some lofty aspirations. General Control seeks to develop compounds that can alter numerous genes in the human body to create lasting effects such as increased muscle mass or better liver function. If the company can do what it hopes, General Control would produce aging therapies far more potent than anything available today.

The work General Control is chasing falls into the category of epigenetic editing, where scientists try to adjust the cellular instructions that tell our genes how active to be. The basic idea is to find compounds that can dial a gene’s activity up or down, depending on what the body needs. If, for example, the genes involved in building and repairing muscle get quieter as we age, a targeted epigenetic edit might turn them back up.

Nuzhna (center) and head of research Giovanni Carosso (right)

Researchers and companies have worked on these techniques for decades. For the most part, we’ve seen some success at silencing individual genes but have struggled to “activate” or turn up individual genes. There’s also been little success at trying to uplevel the function of multiple genes at once. General Control has arrived with the very bold ambition of trying to do what others haven’t by altering multiple genes and turning them up and having those effects last for a long time.

TO DATE, much of the most serious epigenetic editing work has centered on rare diseases triggered by a single gene gone wrong. Scientists have focused on trying to quiet or correct the lone, misbehaving gene.

Nuzhna’s thesis is that advancements in the underlying science have now made it feasible to be broader and more ambitious with epigenetic alterations. Instead of tackling a rare disease, General Control wants to go after conditions that afflict huge numbers of people. “We’re certainly not the first company to try and do this type of editing,” she says, in an exclusive interview with Core Memory. “Our contrarian bet is that epigenetic editing is now safe enough to test on bigger populations.”

The advance that General Control hopes to play off revolves around CRISPR, which is best known for its ability to edit genes by cutting out and replacing hunks of DNA. In this case, however, General Control isn’t using CRISPR to cut DNA at all. Instead, they use it as a kind of GPS system that delivers helpful proteins to exact spots in the genome. Once there, those proteins can switch genes on or off by making the surrounding DNA easier or harder for the cell to read.

“One of the interesting things about these epigenetic editing tools is that you can target more than one gene – not a hundred, but, say, two or three – at a time,” says Jacob Kimmel, the co-founder and president of NewLimit, which competes in the longevity arena. “Instead of making two, totally distinct drugs that go after two genes, I can target genes A and B with one, common editing enzyme that delivers two guide RNA sequences which tell the CRISPR enzyme where to bind in the genome.”

Scientists have been excited about the prospects of this technology for decades, but the results have not always lived up to the hopes. Start-ups chasing these types of editors have faced financial pressures, as investing in therapies based on this technology has dried up in recent years. Nonetheless, companies like Tune Therapeutics and nChroma Bio have pushed forward with the techniques, although, again, often with an early focus on silencing single genes.

Both Nuzhna and her investors contend that the biotech market has been missing out on a bigger opportunity. “It’s a space that was very soured by the market downturn over the past few years, but it’s now much more apparent for which applications this technology is practical and ready for primetime,” says Alex Colville, the co-founder of age1. “We think there’s a mismatch between the state of the science and the dearth of efforts devoted towards therapies based on that science.”

General Control has three initial programs that it’s ready to discuss. It’s going after obesity, liver fibrosis and muscle loss.

On the obesity front, the company thinks it can silence a gene responsible for fat distribution and that its therapy would have benefits beyond GLP-1s like Wegovy. People often regain the weight they’ve lost via GLP-1s after stopping the medication. With General Control, the approach would be more of a one-and-done where the therapy lasts a lifetime. “You want this to be durable,” says Nuzhna. “You silence the gene and never show up to the doctor again.”

The liver therapy also hinges on silencing a gene, while the muscle loss therapy would be General Control’s first stab at activating a gene. Across all three programs, General Control sees opportunities to tweak multiple genes at once to, say, help people lose weight and manage their cholesterol at the same time.

There are a multitude of reasons to temper excitement around General Control for the moment. The company has been operating in stealth mode and has not published data or results from its work. So far, its trials have also only been taking place in mice. And it’s largely starting with the silencing of genes, like most of its existing competitors. The notion of activating multiple genes remains shrouded in uncertainty.

“The best scientists in the world have worked really hard on trying to get the durable epigenetic activation of genes,” says Kimmel. “It’s the kind of thing where, if you did have solid data on this, it would be of global interest.”

The thought that a newly formed, small research team has already surpassed these top scientists thus arrives with healthy skepticism until proven otherwise.

General Control’s head of research is Giovanni Carosso, a geneticist and molecular biologist, who most recently worked at Epic Bio. He’s published extensively in the epigenetic editing field.

The company is also announcing a partnership with Novo Nordisk to apply its technology at a pair of undisclosed gene targets.

The team Nuzhna has assembled along with some of their early research successes have the company’s investors enthused. They’re also hoping that Nuzhna and her background make her a special entrepreneur.

Nuzhna grew up in a small town in Ukraine and came to the U.S. on her own at 18 to attend Northwestern University. A couple of years later, Nuzhna got a Thiel Fellowship, dropped out of school and began working on the Impetus Grants program where she helped raise $34 million. “She raised more money for philanthropy in the aging space than most workers in the philanthropy industry raise in their life,” Colville says.

General Control’s goal, as Nuzhna sees it, is to apply the epigenetic editing as broadly as possible and to go after the aging-related diseases that will be most common. “We’re not the only ones looking at this technology,” she says, speaking from the company’s lab in San Francisco. “What makes us unique is our pursuit of chronic disease as opposed to small, isolated disorders.”