Backed by $3 billion and some of biotech's biggest names, Altos Labs officially emerged from stealth with the ambitious task of reversing disease.
The company, which the San Francisco Business Times previously reported had leased space in Redwood City, will be led by former Genentech Inc. chief medical officer Hal Barron, who currently is president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline plc and held the same position at aging disease research pioneer Calico.
Rick Klausner, the former National Cancer Institute chief and founder of a handful of biotech companies, including South San Francisco's Lyell Immunopharma Inc. (NASDAQ: LYEL), is chief scientist, and Grail Inc. founder and former president Hans Bishop will be president. Rounding out the executive team are former Genentech senior vice president Ann Lee-Karlon as chief operating officer.
The company initially will be based in Redwood City, which will serve as one of three Altos Institutes of Science hubs. Other hubs will be in San Diego and Cambridge, United Kingdom.
The local hub will be run by Peter Walter, a well-known biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The goal of the new company is not to reverse aging itself but the cellular mechanisms of various diseases, including those of aging.
"I am deeply honored to have been offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead such a unique company with a transformative mission to reverse disease," Barron said in a statement. "It's clear from work by Shinya Yamanaka and many others since his initial discoveries, that cells have the ability to rejuvenate, resetting their epigenetic clocks and erasing damage from a myriad of stressors.
"These insights, combined with major advances in a number of transformative technologies, inspired Altos to reimagine medical treatments where reversing disease for patients of any age is possible," said Barron, who will leave GSK effective Aug. 1.
The company said $3 billion is committed to the venture, including cash from ARCH Venture Partners, which has made big bets on Bay Area companies such as early cancer detection company Grail, cell therapy company Sonoma Biotherapeutics Inc., Lyell, cell and gene therapy manufacturing company Resilience and gene therapy company Encoded Therapeutics Inc.
MIT Technology Review, which in September was the first to report the formation of Altos, said at that time that venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, Zynga and 23andMe, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was among Altos' funders. But an Altos spokesperson said Wednesday that ARCH is the only investor Altos is confirming.
The Alto board includes Robert Nelsen, managing director of ARCH, UC Berkeley Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, California Institute of Technology Nobel laureate Frances Arnold and Nobel laureate David Baltimore.
Klausner, Bishop and Barron will co-chair the board.
Induced pluripotent stem cells Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka of UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco will be a senior scientific advisor, overseeing research activities in Japan.
