Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Retro Biosciences is raising a $1bn round to fund the artificial intelligence-powered biotech\u2019s mission to increase human lifespan by a decade, starting by getting its first drug into trials this year.\u00a0\u00a0OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who provided the initial $180mn to seed the start-up, will put in more money in the series A. The company is in talks with family offices, venture capitalists, and sovereign wealth funds, as well as a US \u201chyperscaler\u201d data centre to provide computing power to run the AI models it uses to create and test its treatments.In partnership with OpenAI, the start-up has built a bespoke AI model that designs proteins to temporarily turn regular cells into stem cells, which it says can reverse their ageing process. The San Francisco-based biotech will use the money to fund clinical trials for three drugs, including a potential treatment for Alzheimer\u2019s disease, which will be tested in an early stage study in Australia this year. It is also working on drugs for rejuvenating blood and brain cells.Joe Betts-LaCroix, Retro Biosciences\u2019 chief executive and a close confidant of Altman who has previously sold companies to Google and biotech Recursion, said his goal is to \u201creduce human misery\u201d. \u201cRight now if someone gets Alzheimer\u2019s, it doesn\u2019t matter what your resources are. You know, if you\u2019re like Joe Biden, or Elon [Musk], or whoever, you can write as big a cheque as you want to anybody and nobody knows how to cure it,\u201d he told the Financial Times.Silicon Valley leaders including the Google co-founders and Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos have invested in companies aiming to extend human life, or healthspan: the number of years people can live healthy lives.\u00a0Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery start-up owned by Google, will have an AI-designed drug in trials by the end of this year, its founder Sir Demis Hassabis said this week.Bezos-backed Altos had the largest ever biotech fundraising, raising $3bn in 2022.\u00a0Betts-LaCroix said Altos has \u201cbrilliant minds\u201d and \u201cadmirable, longer range research goals\u201d but he said he and Altman both come from the tech accelerator Y Combinator and so they have a \u201cvery fast paced, action-oriented, target-centric mindset\u201d.\u00a0Sandro Salsano, an Italian financier who runs a family office based in Panama, is leading the fundraising and has joined Retro Biosciences\u2019s board.The company plans to move fast, hoping to dramatically cut the average of 10 to 15 years that it takes to discover and develop a drug. \u201cThe line we\u2019re drawing in the sand is, damn it, we\u2019re going to have our first drug out in the 2020s,\u201d he said.\u00a0Retro Biosciences believes its exclusive partnership with OpenAI will accelerate the process. It is working with the AI company on its language model based on biological data, which can, for example, suggest ways to improve the reprogramming of cells, as a way of reducing the impact of ageing.Working with the $157bn AI start-up also has an \u201culterior motive, bringing biotech into OpenAI\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009you know that you\u2019re making progress towards AGI [artificial general intelligence] when your models are able to make discoveries that humans couldn\u2019t on their own\u201d, said Betts-LaCroix.The biotech\u2019s first drug candidate to be tested in a trial is a pill that restores a cell\u2019s internal recycling process, the failure of which has been linked to diseases such as Alzheimer\u2019s \u2014 the most common form of dementia with more than 55mn sufferers worldwide. But drug developers have struggled to turn back the clock on the disease, with existing treatments only slowing patients\u2019 decline.\u00a0The next two drugs will be cell therapies, one of which will also target Alzheimer\u2019s by replacing the brain cells known as microglia, in a plan that Betts-LaCroix said is a \u201cbit more sci-fi but extremely powerful\u201d. The third is a treatment to replace stem cells in the blood with younger ones.\u201cIf you\u2019re 85 years old and you undergo this therapy, you can replace your blood stem cells with ones that are zero age, and then those ripple out and produce all your blood,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cSo basically, it\u2019s like taking having 80 per cent of all your cells become zero age.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Retro Biosciences is raising a $1bn round to fund the artificial intelligence-powered biotech\u2019s mission to increase human lifespan by a decade, starting by getting its first<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-177323","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}