The cat's on the prowl

First published on Linkedin on 10 July 2015

On 9/11/14 I published a rather longish speculation on Calico.

Almost an year since then, while nothing earth shattering some serious stuff is surely happening at Calico.

Towards making its journey to tackling ageing a smooth affair, Calico has started to identify some fun-n-fit travel-mates, hoard the essentials, chart-out the best road to take & mark-out the detours to make.

• Partnered with The Buck Institute, which is the foremost Geroscienceinstitution & works on aspects as diverse as understanding & altering neurodegenerative processes; Dietary Restriction as a way to modulate ageing to pinpointing Stochastic aspects of cellular degeneration.
• Collaborating with UCSF primarily on their focus area on understandingIntegrated Stress Response (ISR)
• Partnered with Q3B, which is pursuing the biomedical promise by way of seeding dozens of start-ups in its incubators
• Collaborating with Broad Institute that’s crisping up the human genome by resolving the operational portion of it & importantly is developing a new way to discover & re-purpose drugs

The above partnerships are a mix of investment into longer-term scientific breakthroughs and shorter-term stake in innovative biomedical start-ups challenging the routine (Q3B) and showcase Calico’s adherence to its core purpose. But looking at the high focus on neurodegenerative research at Buck Institute (6 out of 9 research components) and UCSF, it's likely the first milestone Calico wishes to reach is tackling cognitive decline linked to ageing.

Make it fast Art, age is catching up!