Google wants to use naked mole rats to find the secret to slow aging

Calico Labs — the mysterious life-extension research and development company backed by Google and pharmaceutical giant AbbVie — is harnessing a colony of MIT Technology Review.

$1.5 billion. They’ll need it — aging studies are notoriously time consuming and expensive, especially ones that involve mammals. After all, to study how an animal ages, you have to age it. That means keeping it alive for years on end.

With mice, that’s usually only MIT Technology Review reported. And that doesn’t include housing, cage changes, and paying for the experiments and tests to look for a molecule that could tell scientists when an animal is aging, and when an intervention is working to slow or reverse that process.

For naked mole rats, these experiments could take even longer. The colony is separate from the Calico headquarters in San Francisco, across the Golden Gate at the relatively) resistant to cancer.

Right now, Calico scientists are reportedly trying to sequence the naked mole rat genome. It’s possible that understanding this animal’s genetics could help scientists figure out how they’ve managed to cheat the aging process. The new they were once restricted to. So, researchers might be able to investigate how changing different genes changes the naked mole rat lifespan. But a word of caution: there’s clearly a lot more going on when it comes to aging than just genetics.

Calico’s Tech Review’s Antonio Regalado that even if everything goes as planned, Calico won’t have any big news for the next 10 years. Hopefully, though, they let us in on what they’re working on in the meantime.