XPRIZE on aging will award up to $101 million for therapies that restore vigor to the elderly

The XPRIZE Foundation today announced $101 million in prizes for researchers who can restore the function of an elderly person’s muscle, cognition, and immune system to a more youthful state. The competition, backed by Saudi money and the success of a women’s athletic clothing line, seeks drugs, other therapies, and lifestyle strategies that target the biology of human aging to extend a person’s “health span,” or the period of life free of disease or disability. Such breakthroughs could also help prevent chronic diseases closely linked to aging that threaten to overwhelm the health care system. “This is the decade where we’ll see a health span revolution,” says Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE’s founder and executive chair. Since 1994, XPRIZE has launched 27 competitions with more than $300 million in prize purses, averaging about $10 million per contest, in areas such as space exploration and firefighting. Only one previous XPRIZE competition, a carbon removal contest announced in 2021, totaled $100 million. The new contest, dubbed XPRIZE Healthspan, is sponsored primarily by Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon Athletica, and the Hevolution Foundation, a nonprofit that supports health span research and is financed primarily by the government of Saudi Arabia. (Wilson is also founder and chair of Solve FSHD, a nonprofit supporting research on a type of muscular dystrophy that he has.) How much researchers could win depends on what they achiev...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research