The contestants in a race to extend life are on their second lap.
In a seven-year global competition, teams are rushing to discover novel therapeutics and interventions that can extend human life by a decade and help people age well.
In 2023, Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur, self-proclaimed futurist, and founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, launched the $101 million healthspan competition. Since then, over 600 teams from 58 countries have put their ideas in the ring, including medical devices, lifestyle interventions, and biological therapies. Today, the competition awarded each of the top 40 teams $250,000 to help them test their hypotheses in clinical trials.
“We’re really pushing at a global scale for people to accelerate the process, so we can get real solutions in the hands of people who need them,” Jamie Justice, PhD, executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan, tells Fortune.
Teams from all over the globe, composed of students, university researchers, and even a Nobel Prize winner, are competing for the coveted prize, which will amount to $81 million.
One team of high schoolers from Malaysia pitched a community-based solution that includes facilitating drum circles with older adults. Another team is testing the potential life-extending benefits of popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs, GLP-1s. Still another is examining whether the drug Metformin can help prevent cognitive decline. By 2030, the winner will have shown that their therapy can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function in a one-year clinical trial of older adults.
“The next breakthrough in aging could come from scientists and entrepreneurs, anywhere. With this prize, we’re igniting a global healthspan revolution, and these semifinalists are leading the charge,” said Diamandis, in a press release. “This competition isn’t just accelerating progress, it’s challenging our society’s beliefs in what’s possible when it comes to aging.”
Judges made up of leading researchers and scientists in the field assessed teams based on whether they illustrated “really solid innovation [on a] potential breakthrough that could affect all of the processes that underlie how we age,” says Justice. Teams had to show a readiness for clinical trials with strong evidence of an intervention that can be scaled to the broader population.
While people are living longer, there is still a decade-long gap, on average, between how well people live and how well they live in good health. This competition is hoping to reduce the gap and extend how long people live in good health.
“We’re looking at solutions that can be proactive and can be generalized to a greater population, so that we can begin to address that gap at a population level,” Justice says.
Teams will submit data from their clinical trials by April of next year, ahead of XPRIZE selecting the top ten finalists in July of 2026, followed by the grand prize winner selected in 2030.
