The Company Trying to Reprogram Aging

**Jacob Kimmel** (0:00)
To make a medicine for you, I don't want to turn you into a bag of stem cells. That would actually be really bad. What I want to do is take your old skin cells, your old liver cells, your old immune cells, and turn them into young versions of themselves. So can I decouple cell age and type in the other direction? Can I reprogram cell age but preserve cell type? And so we're searching for those groups of factors, similar to the factors Yamanaka found, that might be able to reprogram age independently.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:34)
Welcome, one and all, this is Ashlee. I am in our Still in Progress podcast studio, and we have a slightly different podcast for you today. We're gonna be interviewing Jacob Kimmel, the co-founder and CEO of New Limit. I gotta tell you a little bit more about the show, because it's different. But before that, I would urge you all, please go to Core Memory, read the story we put up on Friday about Brad Smith and Tiffany Smith and the Smith family. Brad has ALS. He's the third person to receive the Neuralink Implant. Me and our team spent the last few months hanging out with Brad. I was reporting the story. We've filmed a mini documentary, which you can see on Core Memory or our YouTube channel about them. You can read the story, see the film. The film's going viral on YouTube right now, which is great. Come join everyone else and subscribe. We could use the help and it would be appreciated. More importantly, it's a really moving story. I think it's Tiffany, the wife of this family is incredible. The kids are incredible. Brad's incredible. I think you'll all enjoy it. Now, for this episode, it's a little different than we usually do. We've been filming with New Limit as well. It's a biotech company. They are in this field of IPSC technology-induced pluripotent stem cells. I talk to you guys about them all the time. It's the most exciting area of biotech for me. We have an episode coming on New Limit in a few weeks, but just today, the company has announced that it raised $130 million from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Kleiner Perkins, Human Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
And so obviously, they're going to be pushing on with their efforts. Our interview with, oh, also, they raised more money from Patrick and John Collison, Joe Lonsdale, Fred Ehrsam, other rich people, Josh Kushner that I, it's kind of a who's who of tech investors. So company's doing well. Jacob is one of the most eloquent, and I think just gives really great explanations of how this technology works, what New Limit's trying to do. So I think you'll really enjoy this episode, and then in a few weeks, we'll have a Core Memory show for you guys on the site and on YouTube.
With that, we will go to Jacob in a minute. Please, I know it's cheesy, but like and subscribe to all our stuff. It really does help. And this episode is sponsored again by E1 Ventures. They're a venture capital firm based in the Bay Area. They fund all kinds of deep tech stuff, just wonderful, kind people that I've gotten to know a bit from doing the show. And thank you to E1 Ventures. And here is Jacob.

**Jacob Kimmel** (3:46)
My name is Jacob Kimmel, I'm one of the co-founders and the president here at New Limit. So I run the firm day to day and lead our research programs.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:53)
I've been here once before, it's probably like, I don't know, I want to say like 18 months ago. For people who haven't heard of you guys or learned about this technology, can you give us the overview of what you're trying to do?

**Jacob Kimmel** (4:07)
Of course, this is what I love to do more than anything. So we work on a new technology called epigenetic reprogramming. And we're trying to make new types of medicines based on this tool that will allow us to treat age-related diseases and eventually the aging that occurs in every single person. So epigenetic reprogramming is a very weighty set of syllables, but it describes a pretty simple concept. So all of the cells in your body have the exact same DNA code, and yet they do very different things, which might seem simple on the surface, but is actually kind of profound when you realize it. Your tongue and your eyeball have the same code, and yet they have very different jobs. Turns out that's controlled by a set of chemical modifications on top of the DNA, which basically tell each cell which genes to use and when. As you age, unfortunately, those chemical marks get messed up, for lack of a better term. And so the tools we're using actually try and rewrite that code back to the way it was when you were young. So your old cells use the right genes at the right time, and ideally behave a bit more like their younger cells, allowing you to treat diseases that would otherwise be intractable and to eventually address the challenges that emerge as each of us get older.