NewLimit, a startup that aims to increase how long people can live a healthy life by genetically programming their cells, has raised a $130 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins.
New investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Khosla Ventures also invested, as did returning backers Founders Fund, Dimension Capital, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Patrick Collison and others. The fundraise comes two years after the company raised a $40 million Series A.
Founded over four years ago by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (pictured above), former GV partner Blake Bryers, and stem cell professor Jacob Kimmel, NewLimit claims it has made significant progress towards developing treatments that can restore youthful characteristics to aged cells.
Bryers told TechCrunch the company has discovered three prototype medicines that reprogram liver cells. NewLimit’s lab experiments, he said, demonstrate this rejuvenation can restore the cells’ ability to process fat and alcohol.
The company measures its progress by contrasting how cells from a younger individual and an older person respond to the substances. An older liver cell that has gone through NewLeaf’s epigenetic reprogramming behaves more like a younger cell, Bryers said.
Promising early results notwithstanding, NewLimit is still a few years away from starting human trials.
In the meantime, the company wants to continue developing new anti-ageing medicine using an AI model and then testing the most promising of these machine-generated drugs in its laboratory. “What the AI model allows us to do is run all those experiments in simulation and then only follow up on the most promising subset,” Bryers said, adding that the data points from the experiment are then used to retrain the AI model in a process known as “lab in a loop.”
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Other noteworthy biotech startups developing drugs that aim to increase lifespan include Retro Biosciences, which raised $180 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman two years ago and is reportedly raising a $1 billion Series A; and Altos Labs, which launched with $3 billion in 2022, and is backed by Jeff Bezos.