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- #15 Beyond Yamanaka - here's a safer path to rejuvenation
#15 Beyond Yamanaka - here's a safer path to rejuvenation
This startup can simulate a cell with AI - and the results are spectacular
Peter Ottsjö
October 25, 2024
✅ An exclusive interview with Daniel Ives, CEO of Shift Biosciences. ✅ Simulation-guided cell rejuvenation to defeat the diseases of aging. ✅ ”It actually correlates with the real world experiment.” ✅ Overview of the state of longevity biotech. ✅ My talk at the AI x Longevity Summit 2024 in Sweden.
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”I’m not Shinya Yamanaka - I’m Daniel Ives”
With his signature dry British humor, Daniel Ives has a knack for delivering deadpan jokes so convincingly, you're left wondering if he's serious. Like when he shared the many ways he's tried to keep Shift Bioscience afloat:
”You know, I asked my girlfriend, will you give me your life savings? And she said ’no, go to an investor’. Incredibly wise. As a scientist, you don't have a lot of common sense.”
Now, with the Cambridge based Shift Bioscience securing $16 million in seed funding, I have to say: it’s about damn time. And not just because it means Daniel doesn't have to dip into his own (or his family's) pockets for a while.
Let me tell you why in just a second.
But first I just want to mention another great quality in Daniel Ives: he knows what matters. Shift Bioscience was recently recognized as a certified Vitalist organization. Daniel is committed to solving aging and views the prevalent competitive drive for recognition, funding, and prestige within the scientific and business communities as harmful distractions.
”What I want to do is compete on the finishing line, which is like, what’s the best version of comprehensive rejuvenation? Let's get there and compete. Let's not have some stupid status game ahead of that.”
I first met Daniel back in January this year, at the Longevity Biotech Fellowship retreat in Sweden. Interestingly enough he did a presentation together with Yuri Deigin, on partial reprogramming.
Interestingly because at first glance, you might categorize Shift Bioscience alongside partial reprogramming startups like Altos, Turn Bio, and Yuri Deigin’s company, Youthbio Therapeutics. However, that would be a misconception, even though their ultimate objectives are similar.
I’m not going to walk you through partial reprogramming for the umpteenth time (you can find my comprehensive guide here, and our episode with Yuri Deigin here) but just briefly mention that partial reprogramming is about using Yamanaka factors in a cyclical manner. You want to rejuvenate cells without them losing their identity.
To Daniel, this is a blunt instrument. Despite significant advancements in the field, the real strength of Yamanaka factors, after all, lies in their ability to revert adult cells to a pluripotent state.
”These were always designed to make adult cells into stem cells. And this is an incredibly dangerous activity in vivo. So you can sort of mess around with the timing, but if you don't have absolute control, you create these multi-tissue tumors called teratomas, which, you know, I call it a body without a body plan. So you allow a cell to become a stem cell. It’s given ultimate freedom to do whatever it wants and it does everything”, Daniel Ives tells me.
”So clearly there's something very exciting, which is the rejuvenation, but clearly there's something dangerous, which is the tumor potential. So the opportunity is obvious. Let's get rid of the tumor bit because we're interested in rejuvenation. I'm not Shinya Yamanaka. I'm Daniel Ives. I'm interested in the rejuvenation. I would like to optimize for that.”
And that’s precisely what Shift Biosciences has done. Let me explain how.
