Announcement

To imagine and deliver such a future takes a unique group, and I have spent the last two years scouting the world for the leading experts. Together, we have blueprinted the most daring approaches and built a diverse, international team of pioneering scientists, technologists, innovators, and entrepreneurs to execute. Everything we have done in each of our careers has led to this unique collaboration and the moonshot chance to improve the livesfe of millions.

My journey reflects that passion and need to solve the most complicated technical and societal problems. While an undergraduate at Harvard, I contributed to the study of Earth’s long-term oxygen regulation by quantifying the burial efficiency of organic carbon over hundreds of millions of years. After receiving my B.A. in 1990, I joined the technical staff at IBM Almaden Research Center where I worked on novel human-computer interfaces. I followed this by serving as the CTO of Analog Design, where I led the development of electronic systems in support of industrial research and manufacturing process control. In 2000, I founded and became the CTO at OQO, a computer hardware company that specialized in the manufacturing of handheld computers. According to Guinness World Records, the “OQO” was the world’s smallest full-powered, full-featured personal computer in 2005.

My interests gradually shifted towards the improvement of medicine and in 2010, I joined the startup Halcyon Molecular and led its automation efforts. The goal was to sequence human DNA using electron microscopes in an effort to improve our understanding of biology and medicine. In 2012, I founded the Health Extension Foundation, a non-profit for promoting biomedical research to prevent age-related diseases.

By 2013, I had co-founded Vium and raised the level of financing required to accelerate the development of new medical therapies by automating in-vivo research. When I co-founded Vium, there was no dramatic anti-aging science ready for translation into humans and when I sold Vium in 2020 and surveyed the territory, I saw there had been some jaw-dropping developments.

These “jaw-dropping developments” in anti-aging science began with the discovery that cellular senescence, the process by which cells permanently stop dividing, is not irreversible. Cellular senescence is responsible for many age-related disorders, but through “reprogramming,” this process can be stopped and possibly even reversed, opening possibilities for the repair and rejuvenation of aging cells and tissue. Much more research needs to be done, however, before the biological time-clock at the cellular and tissue levels can be safely reversed or set back.

At Retro Biosciences we are concentrating on finding in vivo evidence that cellular reprogramming and partial reprogramming can safely rejuvenate tissues. We’re also exploring ways in which rejuvenated cells or tissue can be used to cure a disease. We already have discovered a molecule we will soon take into the clinic in our autophagy program. We have also started our first clinical intervention in our blood plasma program and will continue to do in vivo and human studies side-by-side over the next few years.