The investment competition, XPRIZE, launched its largest global contest in its 29-year history Wednesday.
The $101 million Healthspan initiative is a seven-year contest for teams to successfully develop “a proactive, accessible therapeutic that restores muscle, cognition and immune function by a minimum of 10 years” in persons 65-80 years old, XPRIZE said in a statement.
The California-based nonprofit, that seeks radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, made the announcement during the Global Healthspan Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — an event that brings together researchers and entrepreneurs in healthspan science.
The XPRIZE Foundation has been running incentive-based challenges since 1994 for everything from reusable spacecraft to carbon removal systems. While the nonprofit has run other health-focused competitions for rapid COVID testing, pandemic response and next-generation masks, its new Healthspan challenge is the first to target global life expectancy, which has more than doubled in the last 100 years.
Life quality, however, has not kept pace. There is a 12-year gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy in the United States, the group said. Americans may be living longer, but many people are living out their years with a major chronic disease or disability.
With the world’s population of people over the age of 60 expected to almost double between 2015 and 2050, from 12% to 22%, “There is an urgent need to find novel solutions for healthy aging,” the XPRIZE statement said.
“People around the world are living longer, but quality of life has not kept pace,” XPRIZE founder and executive chairman Peter H. Diamandis said in a statement. “By targeting aging with a single or combination of therapeutic treatments, it may be possible to restore function lost to age-related degradation of multiple organ systems.”
He said converging various technologies, including artificial intelligence, gene therapy and cellular medicine, are giving researchers a better understanding of why people age, but revolutionizing the way they age will take global collaboration with cross-disciplinary researchers, clinicians, industry leaders, policymakers, trade organizations and nonprofits.
“Working across all sectors, we can democratize health and create a future where healthy aging is accessible for everyone and full of potential,” Diamandis said.
The XPRIZE announcement comes as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced life expectancy figures for 2022. Men are now expected to live 74.8 years — an increase of 1.3 years compared with 2021 — while women are expected to live 80.2 years, an increase of 0.9 years compared with a year earlier.
“Traditional medicine only treats one disease at a time and only once symptoms appear, without effectively extending human health,” XPRIZE Healthspan executive director Jamie Justice said in a statement. “By developing therapeutics that target biological aging rather than disease, we can revolutionize the way we think about and treat aging.”
XPRIZE cited research from the London Business School and Harvard and Oxford Universities that valued a one-year extension of healthy life at $38 trillion in the global economy. Extending ten healthy years of life is valued at more than $300 trillion.
The XPRIZE Healthspan award is a combination of a $101 million prize purse and a $10 million bonus prize that will be given to a team that can demonstrate restored lost muscular function resulting from Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy, or FSHD, in a year or less. The XPRIZE Healthspan competition is being offered with financial support from multiple individuals and organizations, including two co-title sponsors: the Hevolution Foundation and SOLVE FSHD.
“It does not make any sense to have a long lifespan without being healthy,” said Chip Wilson. The founder and chairman of SOLVE FSHD, a venture philanthropic organization designed to accelerate research that can cure FHSD, he said, “I am thrilled with thinking that I can be functionally healthy both mentally and physically until the end. Together, XPRIZE and SOLVE FSHD will enable people to discover global solutions.”
