Admitting its goal is “audacious”, the largest longevity-focused prize in history – offering $101m (£76m) in prize money – will announce its shortlist of candidates on Monday.
The aim of the seven-year XPrize Healthspan is to develop a way for humans to dramatically rejuvenate muscles, cognition and immune functions, the three systems crucial to healthy ageing.
“This competition isn’t just accelerating progress, it’s shattering the limits of what’s possible when it comes to ageing,” said Jamie Justice, the executive director of XPrize, run by the XPrize Foundation and backed by funders including the Hevolution Foundation.
The winning team should be able to restore these three systems by a minimum of 10 – but ideally 20 – years in humans aged 50 to 80. A key condition of the final prize is that the innovation is accessible to as many people as cheaply and easily as possible.
Another condition is that there will be no delay in rolling out the solution: the winning idea must be scalable in 12 months or less of the final award being made in 2030, after a final $81m one-year clinical trial in older adults.
“Success will profoundly change our approach to ageing and positively affect quality of life and healthcare costs,” Justice said.
XPrize is not the only multimillion-dollar prize on offer to those striving to come up with an answer to ageing: the Saudi-backed Hevolution Foundation has pledged $1bn to fund longevity research, clinical trials and global collaborations over a decade.
The Methuselah Mouse prize (Mprize) has committed more than $4.5m to extend the lifespan of mice as a proxy for delaying human ageing. The Rejuvenation Startup Challenge awards $2-3m to support startups with promising rejuvenation technologies. The Palo Alto longevity prize offers $1m to extend lifespan in mammals.
All these prizes are devised to address the fact that while global life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 100 years, the quality of our health as we age has stalled. There are enormous gaps around the world between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy: in the UK, women can expect to live up to 22 years in poor health. Men live on average 17 years with chronic illness, disability or reduced quality of life.
The aim of XPrize is not to develop cutting-edge therapeutics. “The standout aim is to redefine our approach to extending the healthy, quality years of human life,” Justice said. “The winning intervention will not be disease-specific and reactive, like modern medicine. Instead, it will target the mechanisms of biological ageing itself.
“That will propel our ability to address physical and cognitive functional decline, enhance resilience in the face of illness or disease, and ultimately delay the onset of disability and death.”
On Monday, the biggest prize in the longevity field comes closer as 40 semi-finalist teams are pulled from the XPrize longlist, which comprised more than 1,000 scientists, clinicians, biomedical engineers, longevity technology leaders, pharmaceutical companies, students, biohacker groups and newcomers to the field.
These teams – 14 of which come from the UK – have suggested a wide range of innovations including pharmacological approaches, biological therapies and lifestyle-based interventions, and often combinations of all three.
A common focus of solutions is to regenerate or maintain cellular and tissue function over time through biologics such as stem cell therapy. Immunotherapies and seeking to reverse age-related gene change at the molecular level are another approach.
New or repurposed drugs are frequently posited as solutions by the competing teams, including metformin and rapamycin, for both of which funding has long been sought to clinically prove what many hope will be a breakthrough in anti-ageing.
Of the devices proposed, most focus on electrical stimulation of neural pathways, neuromuscular activation or muscle maintenance.
No matter how technologically advanced the oncoming solutions, Justice says nothing will replace diet and exercise – albeit highly personalised and specific techniques – as the central element in healthy ageing.
“We’re not talking about your five a day here,” she said. “While wholefoods and supplements are the most commonly proposed nutritional solutions from our teams, they’re often suggested in combination with substances like nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), a naturally occurring molecule that is gaining attention as a potential anti-ageing agent.”
Nutraceuticals – foods that offer health benefits beyond their nutritional value – also feature, with a focus on wheatgrass, seaweed, berries, proteins, amino acids, herbal products and metabolism-supporting compounds.
Lifestyle and behavioural approaches are also prominent, often combined with cognitive training, sleep optimisation and community engagement. The most frequent combinations include aerobic and resistance exercise with dietary changes, as well as sleep health paired with meditation, prayer or breathing exercises.