John Ramunas, PhD, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rejuvenation Technologies Inc., a Mountain View, CA biotechnology company pioneering mRNA-based telomere extension therapy to reverse cellular aging. A serial entrepreneur turned neuroscientist, Ramunas spent his PhD at Stanford's Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology inventing the first safe, nonimmunogenic TERT mRNA drug - a technology now protected by 50+ patents. His company, backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, is advancing a pipeline targeting fatal orphan diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and liver cirrhosis, with the long-term vision of a single therapy taken every few years to prevent age-related disease.
Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay is the CEO and co-founder of HexemBio, a New York and Berkeley biotech building what it calls the first scalable blood stem cell rejuvenation therapy. A synthetic biologist with a PhD from UBC and a postdoc at UC Berkeley, he is a two-time founder and Y Combinator alumnus who earlier co-founded the cultivated-meat startup Orbillion Bio. At HexemBio he turns aged hematopoietic stem cells young again by passing them through a recreated embryonic 'Synthetic Yolk Sac' before returning them by IV. The company closed a $10.4M seed round led by Draper Associates in April 2026 and is targeting first-in-human trials by 2027.
Retro Biosciences is a clinical-stage longevity biotech in Redwood City, California with a single, unsubtle goal: add ten healthy years to the human lifespan. Founded in 2018 and launched publicly in 2021 with $180 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the company attacks aging at the cellular level across three platforms - autophagy enhancement, cellular reprogramming, and plasma-inspired therapeutics. Its lead drug, RTR242, an autophagy-restoring small molecule aimed at Alzheimer's disease, entered a first-in-human Phase 1 trial in 2025. A 2026 raise valued Retro at $1.8 billion.

Joe Betts-LaCroix is the co-founder and CEO of Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco longevity biotech on a mission to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. A scientist-turned-serial-entrepreneur who once held a Guinness World Record for building the world's smallest Windows PC, he now leads a company backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026, that has run an Alzheimer's clinical trial and co-developed a longevity-focused AI model with OpenAI. He came to biology by an unlikely route: a D-average high schooler who tinkered in shared houses, then earned straight A's, transferred to Harvard, and did research at MIT and Caltech before co-discovering principles of electron transfer in proteins.