Retro Biosciences wants to add 10 healthy years to your life
Joe Betts-LaCroix’s startup is preparing for its first clinical trial — a pivotal milestone in its war on age-related disease.
For Joe Betts-LaCroix, the answer to every problem seems to be a startup — and an unconventional one at that. An autodidact raised in Oregon and shaped by his eccentric parents, he took a circuitous path to being a founder.
Growing up, he mostly hated school. After graduating, he spent years reading books and tinkering with electronics in the basement of a home he shared with “musicians, artists, and weirdos” before enrolling at a local college in Massachusetts. Betts-LaCroix then transferred to Harvard, where he fell in love with college and structured learning. He earned his undergraduate degree in environmental geoscience and later conducted research in biophysics and robotics systems at other institutions.
In 2000, Betts-LaCroix founded his first startup, OQO Inc. The company made tiny personal computers and received plenty of accolades. But he wanted to do something bigger, more important. “I wanted to do something,” he said, “that I wouldn’t end up feeling cynical about afterward.”
And so, in the early 2010s, he began diving into the scientific research on aging and longevity. He was shocked to find the conversation in Silicon Valley was steeped in marketing, not actual science. “Evidence in tech is pretty straightforward,” he said. “Biology is this kind of black box.”
After studying the literature and starting a nonprofit that held salons with leading longevity scientists and researchers, he decided to found a startup — Retro Biosciences — with an ambitious goal: to find a way to add 10 years of healthy, vital life to humanity.
For the first few years, the company operated in secret. Backed by $180 million in funding from OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, it eschewed a more traditional strategy of focusing on one treatment or drug. Instead, it pursued five — a riskier, more expensive approach. The result: Today, Retro Biosciences is at the vanguard of longevity research and ready to go to clinical trials with a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Freethink sat down with Betts-LaCroix to talk about artificial intelligence, cell rejuvenation, and young blood.
