In November it hired Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, an Irish-born professor who made a name studying the link between aspirin and reduced heart attacks and who has been vocal about our “molecular clocks”, the idea that our genes operate on 24-hour cycles and playing with this can slow down damage. The pair have agreed to halve costs and profit when, or if, anything ever ends up on shelves. This summer the two extended the partnership, pledging an extra $500m each to a project to “discover, develop and bring to market new therapies for patients with age-related diseases, including neurodegeneration and cancer”.Ĭalico will be researching this remedy until 2022, when it will enter into “Phase 2a studies” or, as biotech experts have hinted, human testing phase – and finally the “late stage development and commercial activities”. But no mention of therapies has been made. The research appeared to back up Calico’s end goal. The bizarre, buck-toothed mammals are notable for their long lifespans of more than 30 years. Last January its scientists demonstrated that naked mole rats, of which several live in Calico headquarters, are not more likely to die as they get older. Its website lists only a handful of studies and research tie-ups. So why not imagine a time when we could stop the debilitating grip of ageing, offering a far better quality of life for those who get that far and relieving pressure on healthcare services around the world?īut it has been five years since Calico opened its doors and we have heard little since. The discovery of penicillin in 1928 changed humanity in ways we could not have imagined. Before Louis Pasteur’s germ theory became popular in the late 1880s we believed death by disease was just bad luck. But scientists have suggested wilder things that turned out to be true. Some might scoff at a potion to help us live longer lives. Calico is looking for the magic pill to cure ageing at the root, thus eliminating the greater risk of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and heart conditions that loom ever closer the older we become.

Some 70-year-olds are weak and frail, while some are raring to take a lap around the park. These changes are not consistent among the population and are not strictly confined to someone’s age. It would focus on “health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases”. On September 18 2013, Larry Page wrote to shareholders alerting them that a new company had been born under Google. This venture, Calico, would have one mission: achieve immortality. In the early noughties, Levinson plotted with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to come up with a plan that would change the world using a blank chequebook from the bank of Google, the company they founded. He counted Steve Jobs and the early Silicon Valley pack as friends, and also happens to be Apple’s chairman. The company, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now five years old, but its operations remain highly secretive.Ĭalico was the brainchild of Art Levinson, a biotech entrepreneur who founded Silicon Valley pharmaceutical Genentech which is responsible for several successful cancer treatments. Its name is an acronym for “California Life Company” but its lifeless exterior makes it easy to imagine it being named after another Calico – an abandoned mining town further down the Pacific Coast. The steel and glass building has none of the showmanship of its sister company, with its colourful, attention-grabbing Googleplex campus. Drive an hour north of Google’s headquarters up to Oyster Point, south San Francisco, and you will find the office of Calico Labs.

Calico company