Last year Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials, posted an idea for supercharging medical AI systems: Use data from failed biotech companies.

By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data—types of information usually considered trade secrets. She called these documents “biotech’s lost archive” and said they could be used to help train AIs that would act as powerful copilots in the often opaque drug approval process. 

Today the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI, said it would fund her idea as part of a new effort it calls Public Data for Health, which aims to help artificial intelligence make big leaps in medicine by paying to create “high-quality scientific datasets.”

The basic idea is that AI isn’t going to be capable of making important breakthroughs in curing disease unless researchers can feed the models much more information than they have so far. 

“Everyone is recognizing that data is the biggest bottleneck in successfully applying AI to biology,” says Morgan Levine, a former vice president for computation at Altos Labs, a longevity company.

In its initial round of data grants, the OpenAI Foundation also announced that it would give $40 million to a program to collect data about novel cancer vaccines at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and support OpenAdmet, a group that runs competitions in which researchers try to predict drug effects. 

Teslo’s idea for a biotech archive received $500,000 and will be pursued by 1Day Sooner, an advocacy group representing clinical trial volunteers, which she advises.

“We expect many remaining breakthroughs in preventing and curing disease to come from pairing the intelligence of new models with more observations of the world—in other words, more data,” the OpenAI Foundation said in a statement.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but leader Sam Altman restructured it to form a for-profit corporation that develops new models, launches products, and is now planning an initial public offering of stock that could value it at $1 trillion.

Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet, potentially sitting on $250 billion in stock value. (By comparison, the Gates Foundation and a trust associated with it held about $180 billion at the end of 2025.)  

Making good use of that kind of money will not be easy. The foundation, based in San Francisco, is still hiring for many key roles and started ramping up its grantmaking only this year. Its largest single gift so far, of $100 million, was awarded in August to the Common Health Coalition, an organization that helps patients get access to drugs for hepatitis C.

OpenAI’s charitable efforts come even as apocalyptic fears have broken out about the possibility that runaway AI could wipe out all human life, possibly by launching a deadly bioweapon.

Those fears have been stoked by AI company insiders, some of whom say the chance of human extinction within the next decade is 10% or more. Last week, Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk both endorsed a call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” so that risk prevention can catch up.

Jacob Trefethen, an executive at the foundation, says it essentially operates separately from OpenAI but shares an official mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence “benefits all of humanity.”

“We’re starting grantmaking when we think the best way to achieve that mission is to make grants to external nonprofits, research institutions, and other third parties,” Trefethen said in an interview. He says the foundation hopes to give away $1 billion by the end of the year. 

The $500,000 grant to 1Day Sooner will help the group prove it can obtain the data troves of bankrupt companies, says the organization’s president and cofounder, Josh Morrison. He thinks nonexclusive copies of company datasets could be acquired for only “a few tens of thousands of dollars” each.

His organization is currently in possession of three datasets, two of them donated by Lumen Bioscience, a biotech that previously used the Chapter 11 strategy to gain insights into another company’s drug development efforts. 

Morrison says two other attempts to obtain drug company files this year proved unsuccessful, after 1Day Sooner’s bids were not accepted. 

Bankruptcies could become what some are calling a “new land grab” for AI training. Last month, Google won a bid to take over the corporate data of the failed carrier Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails. That led to objections from flight attendants and others who worried that private or proprietary data could be exposed. 

The drug company files that 1Day Sooner is seeking are known as common technical documents. They typically contain the back-and-forth between companies and regulators, as well as detailed scientific and medical measurements, and essentially provide everything that is known about a drug.

According to Teslo, who is a writer for Works In Progress and a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington, DC, a stockpile of such files could help turn an AI into a regulatory expert, which in her view could be one of the main ways AI helps speed cures to market.

“People say ‘We will invent AI, and AI will cure cancer,’ but that’s very removed from the messy reality and the regulatory process,” she says. “About 70% of the money and time in drug development is spent in clinical development—organizing the trials and testing the drug—but despite that, the process is basically a black box, especially for small biotech companies generating the innovations.” 

Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu is obsessed with aging. And with eyes. As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn’t see oncoming traffic. And Lu’s own 23andMe test came back with a mutation for macular degeneration, a top cause of vision loss in old age. Exposure to bright sunlight is another risk factor—thus the shades. “They protect me,” he says. “Plus, they look cool.”

Lu, 34, works on gene therapies to prevent age-related vision loss. “I think the eye is a really unique system to study aging and rejuvenation,” he says. “I could give a whole presentation.” Pushing up my reading glasses, I lean in to listen.

Lu is behind one of the coolest results in rejuvenation science—and in eye research. In 2018, while earning his PhD at Harvard Medical School, he used an age-reversal technique called reprogramming to repair the optic nerves of mice. He crushed the nerves, blinding the animals, and then injected the cells with a gene therapy meant to restore them to a youthful state. Sixteen days later, the nerves were growing back, their axons showing up through a microscope as spidery orange filaments.

As hype around age reversal swirls, Lu has been busy in the lab searching for what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.”

The head of that lab, the longevity scientist David Sinclair, remembers when Lu texted him the pictures: “He asked me, ‘What do you see here?’ And I said, ‘I see the future.’” Later tests carried out in a box with rotating bars of light showed the mice were tracking the changes. They could see again.

This year, nearly the exact genetic therapy Lu created for mice entered human clinical trials. On June 9, the startup Life Biosciences, which Sinclair cofounded and in which Lu owns a small stake, announced it had injected the treatment into the eye of a person with glaucoma. The trial has been big news. A headline in the New York Times suggested the technology could “change humanity.” Posters on X gushed, with one declaring that “the fountain of youth is here.”

“It’s remarkable that what he developed as a student is now going into humans,” says Sinclair of the treatment, now called ER-100. “It’s barely even changed since he built it.”

Reprogramming refers to an age-­restoring process that takes place inside an embryo. It’s why babies are born young, not old: The DNA they’ve inherited from their parents has been scrubbed and reset. In 2006, Japanese researchers showed they could cause the process to occur in the lab by introducing just four key genes, known by the acronym OSKM. Add these to a cell from a 100-year-old and it will turn into a stem cell that acts as if it was plucked from an embryo.

That’s powerful stuff. But we don’t want to turn people into blobs of stem-cell protoplasm. Lu figured out a way to control the effect. He trimmed the list of genes to just OSK—leaving out M, for Myc, the one most likely to cause dangerous changes like cancer. His extra flash of insight was that reprogramming could be tested on the optic nerve; the eye is particularly accessible.

Lu’s result, published in Nature in 2020, helped set off an investment rush. Since then, US tech billionaires have placed huge bets on private companies like Altos Labs and NewLimit to explore reprogramming and anti-aging medicine. The day I spoke with Lu, he’d spent the morning meeting with the business magnate Zhong Shanshan, one of China’s richest people.  

Still, as hype around age reversal swirls, Lu has been notably absent from the public conversation. He’s been busy in the lab searching for what he calls “the next generation of rejuvenation therapies.” With a sigh, Lu describes the grueling effort over the last six years to understand what OSK really does. The treatment remains toxic to many cell types, and he says it’s becoming obvious that different factors drive aging in each kind. This year, for example, he identified a gene responsible for protecting the retina from damage by free radicals—the main cause of age-­related macular degeneration.

While Sinclair, his former boss, believes humans could live to be 200, Lu disagrees. There’s just too much that goes wrong as we age. His work with OSK, he says, was more a proof of concept than a silver bullet. But it did change the conversation. “Six years ago, you couldn’t talk about rejuvenation. We didn’t use that word—there was pushback,” Lu tells me. “But I think people have accepted the concept that you can really reverse molecular age.” 

The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles.

Now, the payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500-million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether.

The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces.

In addition to Stripe, other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several traders at the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, according to an Intercept spokesperson.

“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. The average person will spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff.

Stripe previously organized a $1.8 billion program called Frontier to encourage the development of carbon removal technology, as a way of countering climate change. Ransohoff says removing carbon from the atmosphere and getting rid of respiratory viruses are similar in that each is “technically possible” but they “lack commercial incentives.”

The concept for Intercept took shape after Ransohoff started talking to David Veesler, a structural biologist and vaccine designer at the University of Washington, who argued that it’s possible to come up with broad countermeasures that work against many viruses at once. 

“He effectively sort of nerd-sniped me,” Ransohoff says of Vessler. “He convinced me that this is technically possible. He also helped me understand that some of the reasons that this hasn’t been done before was sort of an incentive problem.”

Veesler says the growing toolkit available to scientists includes RNA drugs, antibodies, and computational protein design. For instance, one idea is to engineer virus-grabbing proteins that people could spray in their nasal passages, to catch viruses before they can infect people.

 “Most people just accept these viruses as a fact of life, and that got us thinking: do we have to accept it?” says Veesler. “The more we thought about it, the more we realized that many of these problems have not been worked on with modern technologies.”

The project takes inspiration from efforts to fight the covid-19 virus, where Veesler’s group was among those involved in the speedy development of vaccines, anti-viral drugs, and antibodies. 

According to Ransohoff, Intercept’s advisers will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, as well as Moncef Slaoui, the pharmaceutical executive who led the US coronavirus vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed.

A key challenge for Intercept will be coming up with ways to counter many—even all—viruses at one time. That accounts for the group’s interest in air-cleaning technology, such as using strong ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses. The idea, the group says, is to remove viruses from the air in the same way municipalities remove impurities from the water supply before it’s piped to people’s homes.

The US funds about $6.5 billion a year in virus research through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, or NIAID. But that agency’s budget hasn’t grown in recent years, leaving more room for private philanthropy.

And Stripe’s Collison brothers have become some of the most reliable philanthropists in viral research. After giving away “fast grants” to help labs during the covid-19 pandemic, they later joined other donors who committed $650 million to establish the Arc Institute, in Palo Alto, which has developed AI models for biological research.

“The diversity of viruses is just too large and seems daunting, so people don’t even try,” says Veesler. “I’m happy that someone is ready to help scientists, not accepting the status quo, and doing something different.”

The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.

Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. 

The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment. 

Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.”

The trial, if it goes forward, will be a significant new development in the race to harness so-called epigenetic reprogramming. That technology is based on the discovery, 20 years ago, of powerful genes able to turn an adult cell into a stem cell similar to those found in embryos.

The age-reversal effect is believed to occur via a resetting of molecular controls on DNA known as epigenetic marks, which help determine a cell’s overall metabolism and identity.

Companies are now racing to use that phenomenon for a new form of rejuvenation medicine. Only this January, one of Sinclair’s companies, Life Biosciences, made news by winning approval to launch an initial human trial using a set of powerful reprogramming genes. The company announced today it had treated its first patient. 

But that test involves a complex gene therapy and is limited to patients’ eyes, where it could treat conditions like glaucoma. 

Sinclair’s new plan is bolder: a reprogramming drug you’d swallow in order to promote such effects across the body. 

“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” he says. “It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”

This alternative method, chemical reprogramming, uses drugs to mimic the effects of the embryonic genes. That is significant because drug compounds can travel through the bloodstream, reaching most or all cells in a person’s body. 

Some experts expressed caution, saying the chemical process, at least as used in labs, is extremely harsh and not even particularly effective. “Who doesn’t dream of whole-body rejuvenation? I think it’s a great goal,” says Sergiy Velychko, founder of Soxogen, a stealth reprogramming company in Boston. “But these chemicals are used in very, very high concentrations for cell reprogramming.”

Sinclair declined to describe the exact makeup of the drug candidate, code-named SL-100, calling its contents “highly, highly confidential.”

However, he has previously published lab studies of what he called “epigenetic age-reversal cocktails,” which mixed powerful chemicals with known supplements and commercially available medicines. 

It’s those latter components that would be easiest to test on people, since doctors are free to prescribe them, even for unusual objectives like age reversal. James Clement, head of Betterhumans, an organization that specializes in life-extension studies using existing drugs, said in a message that he is “running clinical trials” of an oral reprogramming cocktail for Sinclair’s XPrize team.

Sinclair’s team is competing in the XPrize Healthspan Competition, launched in 2023. It follows several previous competitions that focused on commercial spaceflight, lunar landings, and other goals. The XPrize Foundation is led by executive chairman Peter Diamandis, also an active promoter of longevity research.

“If two teams are equivalent, they would split the award,” says Jamie Justice, a doctor and executive director for the contest, which was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, “But it will be incredibly hard to even get to one winner.”

Justice says a judging panel is now in the process of picking 10 finalists from 65 teams that have been exploring health foods, lifestyle interventions, digital trackers, and drug compounds. 

Sinclair’s team, Justice says, was a late entrant to the contest, but like all teams, it would be required to move into wider human tests starting this year. “You have to be ready and in trials,” she says.

The race to harness the reprogramming phenomenon and apply it to living people is heating up, even outside the XPrize competition. On June 2, a startup called NewLimit, founded by the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, said it had raised a further $435 million, from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to support what it calls “age reprogramming.” 

The company says it is working toward delivering genetic reprogramming instructions to the liver, to treat diseases of that organ.

But Sinclair has been saying that whole-body rejuvenation is a possibility too. And for that, chemicals, rather than gene therapy, could be the most practical strategy. 

Sinclair says his lab has been searching for such compounds and is starting to use AI “to improve the oral agents that we’re testing.”

Chemical reprogramming cocktails, as used in labs, typically involve a mix of vitamins, approved drugs, and experimental molecules. For instance, one recipe Sinclair filed a patent on includes the supplement forskolin,  the antidepressant tranylcypromine, and an experimental chemical, laduviglusib, which has been tested against Alzheimer’s, among other ingredients.

“In those days it was a six-factor cocktail,” Sinclair says of his earlier research. “But we’ve come a long way. I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance on that, and we’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published, but we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”

While Sinclair’s results aren’t published, other teams say attempts to reverse the age of entire animals using chemical drugs haven’t worked yet. Last year, the lab of Vadim Gladyshev, another Harvard biologist and a member of a different XPrize team, reported on its attempt to rejuvenate mice by installing pumps in their bodies that released controlled doses of seven compounds.

Gladyshev says the procedure proved to be toxic. “The idea was to see if we could rejuvenate whole animals. Unfortunately, we have not found [the right] conditions,” he says. “At low concentrations there was no effect, and high concentrations were toxic.”

Gladyshev says he doesn’t know what is in Sinclair’s cocktail, but says that “trying to improve the combinations makes sense.”

Sinclair, who is the author of several books on aging and has a large social media following, has frequently been criticized by other scientists for making unproven rejuvenation claims. 

In 2024, he resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming that a supplement developed by a company his brother runs had “reversed” the age of dogs, a claim for which there was so little evidence that one scientist called it a “lie.”

Part of the problem is that scientists still disagree on how to measure aging. And they don’t have a reliable way to measure age reversal, either, should it ever be achieved.

Justice, the XPRIZE director, says a primary purpose of the competition is to solve that problem by encouraging the development of standardized measures of aging. That is so that anti-aging drugs can be assessed reliably, and, one-day, approved by regulators if they work.

 “We as a scientific field have been forced to ask, ‘If a medicine improves how we age, how would we know?” Justice said during a public meeting with FDA officials in May. “If something worked, what would convince us as scientists, what’s meaningful to the general public?”

Finalists in the Healthspan competition will be announced in August.