Jeff Bezos invested in anti-aging startup Altos Labs; to pay scientists annual salary of $1 million

As you may recall, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO back in July to spend more time on philanthropy and passion projects like his space company Blue Origin. Former AWS executive Andy Jassy later takes over as the CEO of the commerce giant. Now, Bezos is making true of his promise to make the world a better place.

According to a report from MIT Review, Bezos has reportedly invested in Altos Labs, a startup dedicated to discovering how to reverse the aging process. Bezos is one of the investors backing a new anti-aging company. Other backers include Russian-born billionaire tech investor, Yuri Milner, and his wife, Julia. The couple has also invested in the company, according to the report. Milner, known for investing in companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Airbnb, is worth about $4.8 billion, according to Forbes estimates.

Founded earlier this year, Altos Labs is poaching university scientists with salaries as high as $1 million and promises that they can pursue their own research on how cells age and how to reverse that process. Led by CEO Richard Klausner, who served as the 11th director of the National Cancer Institute, Altos was incorporated earlier this year in the United States and the United Kingdom and has plans to create institutes in California, Cambridge, and Japan, MIT Tech Review says.

Among the world’s top scientists said to be joining the startup are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years.

Also joining is Steve Horvath, a UCLA professor, and developer of a “biological clock” that can accurately measure human aging. Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, will chair the company’s scientific advisory board, MIT Reviews wrote.

Altos is not the first aging startup Bezos has funded. In August 2018, Bezos also backed Unity Biotechnology, one of a slew of companies taking part in the zeitgeist of aging research.