One of the world's largest drugmakers just bought into cellular reprogramming. Read what 'clinical' means here.

NewLimit, the San Francisco company working on epigenetic reprogramming — resetting the chemical marks that tell a cell how old to act — announced today an additional $45 million from Eli Lilly, Duke University's endowment, Section 32 and existing investors, at a $1.62 billion post-money valuation, five months after its Series B. The company says its first clinical study is a few years away. That sentence is the one to read. A pharmaceutical company with real drug-development experience has put money behind the most ambitious idea in aging biology, and the people doing the work say human trials have not begun.

What reprogramming is, and where it sits. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka showed that four genes could turn an adult cell back into a stem cell, a discovery that won a Nobel Prize. Partial reprogramming tries to run that process briefly — enough to make a cell act younger without erasing what kind of cell it is. The evidence is in cells in dishes and in mice, where it is real and interesting and sometimes dangerous: push too far and cells lose their identity or form tumors. No human has been treated with a reprogramming therapy in a trial. On the evidence hierarchy this is a mouse dish result with a large check attached, and the company, to its credit, describes it that way.

Ben’s take

This is what serious longevity capital looks like, and it is worth distinguishing from the supplement aisle. A strategic investor with a drug-development organization, a valuation that assumes a decade of work, and a company that says "a few years" before a first human study instead of selling you something tonight. If reprogramming works, it will arrive as a regulated drug for a specific disease, after trials, and the first people to benefit will be sick, not optimizing. Anything sold to you today with the word "reprogramming" on it is borrowing this science's credibility without its timeline.

Loree’s take

I want this to work. I also want my patients to understand that "a few years to a first clinical study" means a decade or more to anything they could receive, if it survives — and most things at this stage do not. In the meantime, the epigenetic age tests sold to consumers measure something related to this biology and change nothing about it. The science is a reason for hope. It is not a reason to buy anything this year.

What to watch. Not the valuation. Watch for an investigational new drug filing, the FDA paperwork that precedes a first human trial, and for which disease it names. That is the moment reprogramming becomes a medicine rather than a biology. Until then, every consumer product that borrows the word is selling the future at today's prices.