This week we bring you the story of New Limit – a start-up based in San Francisco that’s backed by Brian Armstrong, Patrick Collison, Joshua Kushner and plenty of other big-brained billionaires.
I’ll caveat this right away by noting that it’s early days for New Limit and the technology it’s pursuing. And then I’ll go ahead and undermine the caution by telling you that the work being done by New Limit and others in the field is, for me, the most exciting science taking place on Planet Earth.
New Limit has designed its laboratory to hunt for combinations of proteins that take old cells and make them young again. If you don’t spend your days talking about things like transcription factors and epigenetic reprogramming, then this should sound like an audacious, possibly bullshit pursuit. But it’s not.
The Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka proved years ago that you can take a cell from an old animal, hit it with four proteins (the transcription factors mentioned above) and reverse that cell all the way back to its stem cell state. In other words, he devised a relatively simple way to erase decades of aging. He won a Nobel Prize for the work in 2012, and it was awarded very quickly after his discoveries because the science showed such promise.
This technology is useful but not perfect if you want to use it for age reversal and longevity. You don’t, for example, want to take a liver cell and rewire it into a stem cell every time. Instead, you want to take an old liver cell and reverse it to a young liver cell. And this is at the crux of New Limit’s epigenetic reprogramming work.
The company is hunting across millions upon millions upon millions of combinations of transcription factors to try and find the right recipes and techniques that will take an old liver cell or brain cell or heart cell and rejuvenate them without taking them back so far as to become blank slate stem cells. So far, it’s seen the most promising progress with liver cells and T-cells.
We get into the company’s techniques, successes and incredible science in the video above.
If you want to dive deeper, we have a full interview with New Limit’s President and co-founder here.
And we have a previous video on Retro Bio, one of New Limit’s rivals here.
And we have a full interview with Retro’s CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix here.
Go nuts. We did.
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