(p. B1) Arch is the largest institutional investor in Altos, which already has $3 billion of committed investments, likely making it the biotech indus-(p. B2)try’s best-funded startup on record.
Nelsen is characteristically unrestrained when discussing Altos’s prospects.
“Epigenetic reprogramming is the biggest thing in healthcare in 100 years. Or ever,” he says. “We will clearly live much healthier and longer lives if this works.”
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A native of Walla Walla, Wa., Nelsen studied biology and economics at the University of Puget Sound before getting an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago.
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His manic energy can lead to confrontations. Nelsen drives his GMC Yukon so aggressively that some friends avoid riding with him. He’s started fights with supermarket customers who resisted using plastic bags.
“I hate plastic bag bans, because the assumption that they are better for the environment than paper is flawed and I am grown up enough to not have government choose my bag for me,” Nelsen says.
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Taking cells back to their youthful, healthier state long captured the imagination of scientists, but seemed unlikely. Then a breakthrough paper published in 2006 by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka and a colleague showed mature skin cells of mice could be reprogrammed into primordial, immature stem cells—called induced pluripotent stem cells—in effect resetting their molecular clocks. Yamanaka, who later shared a Nobel Prize for work in this area, is an adviser to Altos. In 2016, Spanish biochemist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, Altos’s founding scientist, showed how the age of cells could be reverted without changing their genome and identity. His work demonstrated the potential for toggling between the ‘old’ and ‘young’ states of cells—the basis for Altos’s effort to rejuvenate cells.
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(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 20, 2023, and has the title “For This Venture Capitalist, Research on Aging Is Personal; ‘Bob Has a Big Fear of Death’.”)