And Peter Thiel and Sam Altman invested in it…:
It’s certainly no accident that Minicircle opened its first gene therapy clinic in Próspera, which is formally administered as a Zone for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) in Honduras. A bustling private enclave on the tropical island of Roatán, Próspera has pulled in investment from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and is managed by an international group of libertarians (although they reject this label, claiming instead to champion a nonideological manifesto of freedom and prosperity).
It’s a philosophy that appears to resonate with biohackers as well as tech titans. Thiel, who has pumped millions into longevity research and has said the possibility of injecting himself with the blood of young people is “really interesting,” has also invested directly in Minicircle
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also confirmed to MIT Technology Review that he has plowed $250,000 into the startup.
It ultimately aims to democratize access to gene therapies, with an emphasis on discovering the right nucleic cocktail to promote longevity.
The follistatin gene therapy increases muscle mass in animals. It doubles bone density and halves body fat, the cardiovascular system is rapidly improved, the animals live longer, and they’re healthier,” claimed Davis. In fact, his and his associates’ ad hoc human experiments with follistatin are what served as the impetus to start Minicircle: “We’ve seen some very interesting effects,” he said.
Minicircle is taking something of a different tack. The startup, which is registered in Delaware, aims to fuse elements of the traditional drug testing path with the ethos of “biohackers”—medical mavericks who proudly dabble in self-experimentation and have long hailed the promise of DIY gene therapies.
The eccentricities don’t end there. Minicircle’s trials are going ahead in Próspera, an aspiring libertarian paradise born from controversial legislation that has allowed international businesses to carve off bits of Honduras and establish their own micronations. It’s a radical experiment that is allowing a private company to take on the role of the state. While much attention has been paid to the charter city’s use of Bitcoin as legal tender, the partnership with Minicircle is an important milestone toward another goal—becoming a hotbed of medical innovation and a future hub of medical tourism.
At least one prominent scientist sees a potential upside to growth in the biohacking space: George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has previously consulted on biohacking endeavors, tells me he welcomes the evolution of biohacking self-experimentation into full-blown clinical trials. He isn’t familiar with Minicircle’s work specifically, but he says of the general premise, “As long as nothing goes wrong, it could herald a revolution in cost reduction.”
But Harper says he hasn’t heard anything related to Minicircle’s more outlandish claims that follistatin gene therapy decreases chronic inflammation and body fat, boosts DNA repair, and promotes age reversal. Robert Kotin, a gene therapy expert and professor of microbiology and physiological systems at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, echoes Harper’s skepticism: “If I wanted to make a fountain-of-youth drug, I don’t think it would be follistatin.”
But human studies using the minicircle technique have so far failed to deliver DNA to the nucleus of the cell in a way that is clinically relevant, safe, and therapeutic, says one of its creators, Mark Kay, a Stanford University professor of genetics (although he notes that the method has found some success in vaccines). From what he could find out on Minicircle’s website, Kay doesn’t understand why the startup would succeed where others have failed. “Where’s the novelty in any of their technology?” he asks. “How is it different?”
