Google, Calico, 23andMe, Genentech, Facebook, AncestryDNA, Illumina, RUCDR Infinite Biologics - immortality for wealthiest

(November 27, 2013) 23andMe Is Terrifying, but Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks
While the FDA concentrates on the question of whether 23andMe’s kit
is a safe and effective medical device, it is failing to address the real issue:
what 23andMe should be allowed to do with the data it collects.
For 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service is much more than a medical device; it is a one-way portal
into a world where corporations have access to the innermost contents of your cells
and where insurers and pharmaceutical firms and marketers might know more about your body than you know yourself.
And as 23andMe warns on its website, “Genetic Information that you share with others could be used against your interests.
You should be careful about sharing your Genetic Information with others.”
[link to www.scientificamerican.com (secure)]

(January 6, 2015) Surprise! With $60 Million Genentech Deal, 23andMe Has A Business Plan
A deal being announced today with Genentech points the way for 23andMe,
the personal genetics company backed by Facebook billionaire Yuri Milner and Google Ventures
to become a sustainable business – even if the company’s discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stretch on for years.
Such deals, which make use of the database created by customers who have bought 23andMe’s DNA test kits and donated their genetic and health data
for research, could be a far more significant opportunity than 23andMe’s primary business of selling the DNA kits to consumers.
Since it was founded in 2006, 23andMe has collected data from 800,000 customers and it sells its tests for $99 each.
That means this single deal with one large drug company could generate almost as much revenue as doubling 23andMe’s customer base.
“I think that this illustrates how pharma companies are interested in the fact that we have a massive amount of information,” says Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s chief executive and co-founder.
Wojcicki and her husband Sergey Brin (the two are now separated) have been very public about their desire to understand Parkinson’s, which runs in Brin’s family.
[link to www.forbes.com (secure)]

(January 11, 2015) Live for ever: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
Fixing the ‘problem’ of ageing is the mission of Silicon Valley, where billions is pouring into biotech firms working to ‘hack the code’ of life
– despite concerns about the social implications. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company.
Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer
and healthier lives”. Though much mystery surrounds the new biotech company, it seems to be looking in part to develop age-defying drugs.
In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal,
and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people. In March 2014, pioneering American biologist and technologist Craig Venter
– along with the tech entrepreneur founder of the X Prize Foundation, Peter Diamandis – announced a new company called Human Longevity Inc.
It isn’t aimed at developing anti-ageing drugs or competing with Calico, says Venter. But it plans to create a giant database of 1 million human genome sequences by 2020, including from supercentenarians.
In an office not far from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, with a beard reaching almost to his navel, Aubrey de Grey is enjoying the new buzz about defeating ageing.
[link to www.theguardian.com (secure)]

(April 4, 2015) Tech titans’ latest project: Defy death
Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city's soaring skyline, Peter Thiel
was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical.
Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist and biogerontologist who had garnered attention for doubling the life span
of a roundworm by disabling a single gene. Aubrey de Grey, a British computer scientist turned theoretician who prophesied that medical advances would stop aging.
And Larry Page, co-founder of an Internet search darling called Google that had big ideas to improve health through the terabytes of data it was collecting.
He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research.
The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out,
figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.
“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”
[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]

(April 4, 2015) Another Personal Genetics Company Is Sharing Client Data
Today, personal genetics company AncestryDNA announced a partnership with the Google-owned biotech Calico,
which is working to research the biological drivers of longevity.
This collaboration is one of a few recent partnerships between personal genetics companies and pharma-minded businesses.
In January, the beleaguered 23andMe announced that it would share anonymized data on 650,000 of its customers with Pfizer,
as well as sequence the full genomes of 3,000 people with Parkinson's in a bid to develop a drug with Genentech.
Typically, it takes a lot of cajoling to get people—the research community would call them participants, or volunteers, or patients—
to part ways with their biological bits. But companies like AncestryDNA have convinced customers to pay to give their genetic data away,
at a cost of about $100 per sample. This is the same sort of bargain you make when you begrudgingly hand your personal information over to Google or Facebook:
You sacrifice some amount of data about yourself in return for added convenience.
While a consumer gets a certain amount of information from their genetic test—information about their ancestry,
or living relatives who have also gotten sequenced—their genetic data is almost always more valuable in aggregate.
And for Calico, a huge genetic database could be worth a lot, especially once data-miners combine it with Ancestry's forest of family trees.
[link to www.wired.com (secure)]

(January 11, 2017) Illumina wants to sequence your whole genome for $100
The first sequencing of the whole human genome in 2003 cost roughly $2.7 billion, but DNA sequencing giant Illumina has now unveiled a new machine
that the company says is “expected one day” to order up your whole genome for less than $100.
Illumina’s CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
in downtown San Francisco today, telling the crowd the machine’s scanning speed could decipher an entire human genome in less than an hour.
Six customers have already come on board to test NovaSeq, including the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (the life sciences arm started by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan),
the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and biotech companies Regeneron and Human Longevity Inc.
[link to techcrunch.com (secure)]

(March 6, 2018) What if billionaires could live forever?
Several billionaires, most of them Californians, have been funding firms involved in developing life-extension technologies.
What if they succeed? What if billionaires alive today live indefinitely and get ever richer?
Diamandis and Hariri's new venture is the latest example of a well-established phenomenon in Silicon Valley:
Extremely wealthy techno-optimists have for years been funding biomedical R&D companies meant to achieve immortality for their funders.
Some of the more recognizable names who have been putting money into such efforts: Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle),
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), and Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies.
Palantir, by the way, is a "big-data" company that uses algorithms to scan huge datasets for patterns.
It does a lot of work for US government intelligence agencies. Thiel is a radical corporate libertarian, and Silicon Valley's best-known Donald Trump supporter.
In late February, Diamandis wrote to subscribers of his email bulletin: "I asked the smartest people I know for their tech predictions for the next 20 years (2018 – 2038).
What are the breakthroughs we can expect on our countdown to the Singularity?" One of the predictions he listed was that by 2030, "humanity will have achieved Longevity Escape Velocity for the wealthiest."
[link to www.dw.com (secure)]

(November 12, 2019) Meet the Startup: Chronomics’ epigenetics out of the lab
At Chronomics, we are defining the objective measures of health that go beyond blunt measures of biological age
and have the power to support the longevity space through provision of tractable measures of efficacy and impact.
The longevity sector is hugely important for the future of health globally and we are excited to be delivering the tools
to support the companies developing the therapeutics and interventions that will define the future of prevention.
[link to www.longevity.technology (secure)]

(April 10, 2019) Long-lived bats could hold secrets to mammal longevity
Biologists found four bat lineages that live at least four times longer
than similar-sized mammals and revealed new traits associated with bat longevity.
University of Maryland researchers analyzed an evolutionary tree reconstructed from the DNA
of a majority of known bat species and found four bat lineages that exhibit extreme longevity.
They also identified, for the first time, two life history features that predict extended life spans in bats.
Their work is described in a research paper, published in the April 10, 2019 issue of the journal Biology Letters, which concluded that horseshoe bats,
long-eared bats, the common vampire bat and at least one lineage of mouse-eared bats all live at least four times longer than other, similarly sized mammals.
This ability allows a vampire bat to conserve energy if it fails to obtain a blood meal.
Scientists have previously suggested that the ability to tolerate variations in body temperature may enable some mammals to fight infection
better than those without that ability. This happens to a limited extent in humans when the immune system attempts to kill a virus or bacterial infection
by raising body temperature and causing a fever.
"If we lived as long as bats, adjusted for size, we could live 240 years," Wilkinson said.
"Everybody wants to know how these animals can live so long. This kind of work can help us get to the answers."
[link to www.sciencedaily.com (secure)]

(April 13, 2020) Rutgers' saliva-based test nets FDA green light for COVID-19
Clinical genomics researchers at Rutgers University have received the FDA’s first emergency authorization
for a COVID-19 diagnostic test that uses easy-to-collect saliva samples instead of the more difficult deep nose swabs.
Developed in collaboration with Accurate Diagnostic Labs and utilizing Spectrum DNA’s spit collection and preservation kits,
vthe researchers were able to show their saliva-based test performed just as well as as the potentially painful swabs
when searching for the specific RNA sequences linked to the novel coronavirus.
Built off a previously authorized COVID-19 test developed by Thermo Fisher,
Rutgers’ assay uses the same PCR hardware and chemical components as the company’s TaqPath kit.
Saliva specimens must be stored or transported at ambient temperatures, and tested within 48 hours of collection, according to the researchers.
[link to www.fiercebiotech.com (secure)]

(May 8, 2020) F.D.A. Clears First Home Saliva Test for Coronavirus
The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that it had granted emergency authorization for the first at-home saliva collection kit
to test for the coronavirus. The test kit was developed by a Rutgers University laboratory, called RUCDR Infinite Biologics, in partnership with Spectrum Solutions and Accurate Diagnostic Labs.
“A patient can open the kit, spit into the tube, put the cap back on and ship it back to our lab,” said Dr. Andrew Brooks, chief operating officer and director of technology development at RUCDR.
“We bring the test to the patient, instead of the patient to the test.”
[link to www.nytimes.com (secure)]

(May 15, 2020) LabCorp launches return-to-work services for employers
LabCorp Employer Services provides customized return-to-work solutions
using LabCorp’s trained medical staff for employee check-in health questionnaires, temperature screens, and COVID-19 test collection
at the employer site or offsite. The service gives employers access to LabCorp’s COVID-19 testing solutions including its at-home collection test kit,
its fingerstick antibody blood test, and in the fall, flu vaccination services.
[link to www.mlo-online.com (secure)]

(May 20, 2020) Bill Maris, who started Google’s VC arm, brings on Google walkout organizer at his new venture firm
Section 32 is one of the newer bio investment funds on the block. It was founded by the first CEO of Google Ventures, Bill Maris,
who also helped start Calico, a Google project (now Alphabet company) dedicated to anti-aging technology.
So far, Section 32 has invested in about 40 companies, including Auris, a microsurgical robotics company that sold to Johnson & Johnson;
Alector, a therapeutics company focused on neurodegenerative diseases; and Vir, an infectious disease-focused company that is working on new vaccines,
including for Covid19. More broadly, the fund is also looking at machine learning, cybersecurity, oncology, infectious diseases, diagnostics and brain health.
Maris also remains interested in anti-aging technology, and he typically meets with three to five founders a week in the space. He doesn’t believe that Calico,
which he helped start, has done enough yet to prevent new players from getting into the space.
[link to www.cnbc.com (secure)]

(June 7, 2020) New saliva test could deliver Covid-19 result within one hour
The tests work by people spitting into a tube and posting the sample to a lab
A new saliva test could help the government meet its target of working out whether someone has coronavirus within 24 hours.
The government is in talks with British company Chronomics about rolling out the test which would involve people who are suspected to have Covid-19 spitting into a tube and posting the sample to a lab. The company is aiming to produce test results within one hour
of the samples arriving at labs.
[link to inews.co.uk (secure)]