Anti-aging startup NewLimit is back with a fresh fundraise of $435 million after landing on its first clinic-ready candidate years earlier than expected.
The series C was led by longtime supporter Founders Fund, which was joined by fellow returners like Kleiner Perkins, Eli Lilly Ventures and Human Capital, alongside newcomers Thrive Capital, Greenoaks and Quiet Capital. Founders Fund was co-founded by prominent tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
After closing a $130 million round last May with the expectation that it would take several years to develop a drug ready for clinical testing, NewLimit instead found that a promising compound jumped out of its data at the end of last year, co-founder and CEO Jacob Kimmel, Ph.D., recalled to Fierce Biotech.
“We started to get data that was far more compelling than we had ever expected at that point in time,” Kimmel said. “We were surprised by how rapidly it came together.”
NewLimit’s team had put immense effort into building a screening platform that allowed them to find and test combinations of transcription factors, proteins that activate different genes, within various cell types. While Kimmel initially planned for it to take three or four years to find the right combo to reprogram liver cells to be more youthful, the biotech’s current main focus, the right mix, instead became obvious in months.
Kimmel wouldn’t disclose the identity of the winning transcription factors, only saying that there are fewer than ten of them packaged inside the lipid nanoparticle in mRNA form. Once delivered to the liver, this mRNA can be read by the cell’s machinery to be made into functional proteins that help to reset the organ’s age.
NewLimit’s lead liver combo has proven its worth in preclinical models, Kimmel told Fierce, with the ability to boost regenerative capacity in old livers. The candidate is also able to make older mice more tolerant of alcohol, more akin to their younger counterparts.
“Older animals actually become severely sedated for many hours,” the CEO said. “You could see with your naked eye where animals that had received the treatment were resilient, just like young ones were.”
With a drug candidate in hand sooner than expected, NewLimit plans to push into a phase 1 trial next year. The initial focus will be on patients who have fatty livers from a suite of sources, with phase 2 development then set to narrow in on alcohol-related liver disease. But from that starting point, Kimmel sees a much broader potential for NewLimit’s pioneering candidate.
“About half of all individuals over 60 develop something called metabolic syndrome, which is a concomitant increase in obesity, diabetes, kidney failure, a whole series of symptoms,” he told Fierce. “A meaningful fraction of that is controlled by the age of the liver, as it’s a central node in your metabolism.”
But NewLimit isn’t stopping at the liver. Flush with cash, the biotech is also finalizing transcription factor combos for two other cell types: endothelial cells within blood vessels and T cells. Kimmel has his sights set on the vasculature of the kidneys as a potentially transformative treatment for chronic kidney disease (CKD).
“CKD treatment is something like half to 1% of U.S. GDP every year,” Kimmel said, making it a huge burden on the healthcare system. “We have no real efficacious therapies.”
When it comes to T cells, he thinks reversing aging can improve the immune cells’ function in diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.
The fundraise will also allow NewLimit’s team of around 50 staffers to scan a broad swath of other cell types to see which are most amenable to the company’s fountain of youth technique.
“There’s a chance that some cell types are easier to reprogram than others,” Kimmel explained. Once the biotech knows what those cells are, the plan is to launch even more therapeutic programs.
Kimmel thinks the sky is the limit for NewLimit’s cellular reprogramming approach, with the potential to produce a panoply of benefits much like those now seen with GLP-1s. The initial plan is for NewLimit’s medicines to be delivered through monthly IV infusions, with the hope of cutting back on dosing frequency in the future.
It’s perhaps not surprising that a company like NewLimit, billing itself as anti-aging and health span-focused, was able to corral $435 million just a year after bringing in $130 million. Longevity is one of the hottest tickets in biotech today, but in addition to honest pursuers of new medicines, the field is also rife with charlatans and hucksters peddling unproven peptides and snake oil.
“Historically, there has been a lot of over-salesmanship and a lack of real rigorous science in aging biology,” Kimmel, a stem cell biologist by training, told Fierce. This has led to many talented researchers “self-selecting out” of the field, he said, unwilling to associate with hype mongers.
Kimmel hopes NewLimit can bring the same “rigorous, deeply scientific approach to developing medicines” to anti-aging that is seen in other areas of biotech, all in the name of addressing diseases that by definition will impact billions.
“Is there any other set of diseases that every single person will one day get?” he asked. “It is clearly the most important problem in all of therapeutics.”
