Last August, stem cell biologist and bit.bio founder Mark Kotter launched a new startup with an ambitious goal: within a year, to identify every gene that plays a role in restoring or repairing aging cells.
That company, called clock.bio, says it has identified a list of 140 genes that it calls the “Atlas of Rejuvenation Factors.” The startup isn’t naming any of the genes yet, but it’s going through them one by one to come up with the top 10 that it believes will make good drug targets.
“We see a couple of genes that you would expect,” Markus Gstöttner, who was appointed CEO of clock.bio in March, told Endpoints News in an exclusive interview. “Then there are other genes that are kind of much less well understood, and on all of them, we want to understand how the pathways work at a cellular level.”
Gstöttner, who co-founded the lab-grown meat startup Meatable with Kotter in 2018, said that clock.bio views itself as a “faster, smaller, more nimble” competitor to Altos Labs, the anti-aging biotech that launched with $3 billion in 2022 and a focus on “cellular rejuvenation programming.”
In contrast, clock.bio launched with a modest $4 million in a pre-seed round last year and recently raised an additional $5.3 million in its seed funding. The round was led by London venture capital firm LocalGlobe. Other investors include BlueYard Capital, Onsight Ventures and Abcam founder Jonathan Milner.
Some of the money has already gone to massive CRISPR screens and single-cell RNA sequencing experiments on more than three million stem cells. The company says it forcibly ages stem cells and then uses gene editing to activate or inhibit genes to find ones that promote or prevent rejuvenation.
Gstöttner said that one-quarter of the 140 genes promote rejuvenation when activated. But the company is actually more excited about the other 75% of genes that promote rejuvenation when they are knocked out. That’s “good news,” Gstöttner said, since inhibiting genes or the proteins they encode is a far easier task.
Mark KotterLast year, Kotter told Endpoints that a comprehensive screen of the human genome would rapidly lead to ideas for new drugs that could extend human healthspan, the amount of time we live free from the diseases of aging, by two decades. That extension will be measured with molecular clocks, tests that rely on changes to epigenetic markers, gene expression or certain genetic sequences to estimate a person’s age.
But proving that these biomarker changes are linked to better health outcomes could prove tricky. Like other biotechs that have been treading into the anti-aging territory, clock.bio will likely need to assess more traditional clinical endpoints in specific diseases to appease regulators.
Clock.bio has set the goal of starting a Phase 3 clinical trial by 2030. That tight timeline will likely require the company to find existing small molecule compounds, either approved or still-experimental drugs, that can rapidly move through animal testing and into the clinic.
Gstöttner said that in addition to advancing its own pipeline of repurposed drugs, he will look for pharma partners to create new drugs for some of the startup’s most promising rejuvenation genes. The partnership hunt and a Series A fundraise will begin in earnest next year.