First. The news.
The bio-tech player New Limit has raised $130 million from just about the fanciest assembly of smart, rich people imaginable. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross – via NFDG - Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Human Capital are there in their corporate forms and Patrick and John Collison, Josh Kushner, Joe Lonsdale and Fred Ehrsam are there as individuals.
Over the past four years, New Limit has been trying to identify the right combinations of transcription factors – a certain class of proteins – that can rewind cells and take them back to a younger state. Their work piggybacks on the Nobel Prize winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, and it’s among the most exciting technology in the entire bio-tech field – at least for me. As you’ll hear in this interview, they’ve made massive progress over the past 18 months or so.
We’ve talked about transcription factors and related technology with Joe Betts LaCroix from Retro (podcast under the Joe link, and full video episode on Retro here) and with Brian Armstrong, who co-founded New Limit.
In this episode, however, we hung out with Jacob Kimmel, another New Limit co-founder, for a real deep dive on transcription factors and New Limit’s approach to taming them. Kimmel is as clear and eloquent as it gets on explaining this technology.
This pod might feel different than the usual pods. It comes from a sit down interview we did with Kimmel for an upcoming Core Memory video on New Limit. Still, it’s glorious.
The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by the wonderful people at E1 Ventures. Their money and hearts are pure.
Insanely cool science. I suspect that partial reprogramming will be one of the most important developments in our lifetime.