On August 27 in Incheon, South Korea, a quiet audience listened as Peter Walter, a white-haired neuroscientist known for his pioneering research on cellular stress, revealed an extraordinary claim.
“The day after we injected the drug, a miracle happened,” he said. “The mice began recovering until they were nearly indistinguishable from normal ones.”
Peter Walter, a recipient of the Lasker Award and the Breakthrough Prize often called Silicon Valley’s Nobel, is now leading a project at Altos Labs in the United States.
The company, backed by Amazon with a three-billion-dollar investment, aims to end aging itself.
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The drug that reverses decline
The drug at the center of this research is called ISRIB, short for Integrated Stress Response Inhibitor.
In early experiments, older mice given ISRIB showed stunning improvements in memory and learning.
In one test published in eLife, elderly mice were placed in a water maze where they normally took a full minute to find a hidden platform.
After receiving ISRIB, they completed the task in just 16 seconds. Their brains seemed to regain the agility of youth.
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For Silicon Valley’s tech giants, this was more than just a scientific curiosity. It was the potential key to a longer, healthier life.
Tech titans race toward immortality
ISRIB’s promise soon drew the attention of Calico, Google’s medical research company dedicated to extending human lifespan.
Walter initially licensed the technology to Calico before continuing its development at Altos Labs.
Today, these two powerful companies, Amazon and Google, are investing billions in what some call the new “immortality race.”
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Their shared goal is to understand, and perhaps one day control, the biological processes of aging.
Although ISRIB is still in development, it raises an urgent question: if aging can be reversed in mice, could humans be next?
This article is based on information from Joongang og eLife.
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