In late 2024, at a closed-door talk, entrepreneur Joe Betts-LaCroix made a bold prediction: his company, Retro Biosciences — which received a $180 million seed investment from OpenAI’s Sam Altman himself — would go after the hardest target in longevity: extending healthy human lifespan by ten years. Sixteen months later, much of what he described has become reality — and faster than expected.
The thesis: aging is a problem of old cells
Retro’s bet starts from a simple, audacious idea: aging is, to a large extent, the buildup of old cells — and the solution is to replace them with young ones. The technique behind it is cellular reprogramming: taking adult cells, reverting them to a youthful state using the so-called Yamanaka factors (a Nobel Prize-winning discovery), then guiding them back into whatever cell type is needed. The result: biologically younger cells.
The turning point: when AI enters the lab
The most interesting part for anyone following technology is what happened when artificial intelligence joined in. Partnering with OpenAI, Retro used an AI model trained on protein sequences to redesign the Yamanaka factors. The gain was striking: the AI-designed proteins proved more than 50 times more effective than the originals at reprogramming cells. Over 30% of the generated variants outperformed the natural versions — an extremely high hit rate for a field where traditional engineering tests thousands of mutations for modest gains.
It’s a clear signal of a bigger shift: AI is no longer just a text tool — it has begun to design solutions in extremely complex domains such as biology. As Betts-LaCroix put it, at some point we will become “spectators to science” as it advances.
From the slide to the patient
None of this stayed on paper. In December 2025, Retro dosed its first human patient in a Phase 1 clinical trial run in Australia. The candidate, RTR242, was designed to restore a cellular “cleanup” system that fails with age — with Alzheimer’s as the first target.
Why this matters for your business
Retro’s case is a snapshot of where technology is heading: AI is accelerating discoveries that used to take decades. If it’s already happening in something as hard as reversing aging, imagine the impact on a company’s everyday tasks — support, marketing, content, data analysis. The same wave rewriting medicine can, on a smaller scale, transform how your business runs. Riding that wave, with both feet on the ground, is exactly what we do.
Content based on Peter Diamandis’ newsletter. Read the original and follow his work at diamandis.com. This information is for educational purposes and is not medical advice.