XPRIZE Healthspan Competition Offers $101 Million Prize

XPRIZE Healthspan aims to foster better health for people over 60.

Global life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century, but quality of health has not increased at the same rate. EXPRIZE Healthspan recently announced a $101 million prize with the goal of closing that gap.

The record-breaking prize money will be awarded to the inventor of a therapeutic that “restores muscle, cognition and immune function” by at least 10 years in people 65 to 80 years old, with the potential for a 20-year extension. The efficacy of this therapeutic must be demonstrated in one year or less.

Largest Competition in History Fostering Innovation

The seven-year global competition, which was announced on November 29, is reportedly the largest competition in history designed to foster innovation. It’s also the largest prize offered to date by the XPRIZE Foundation, which is the world’s leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions “to solve humanity’s grand challenges,” according to an XPRIZE statement.

While meeting EXPRIZE Healthspan’s criteria for winning the prize seems like a daunting quest at this time, EXPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis believes a moonshot approach is necessary to make meaningful progress in this field.

“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,” said Diamandis, who is an engineer and a physician.

XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis

Huge Economic Benefits

Aside from the human suffering that could be alleviated, the economic benefits would be profound.

In the U.S., a 12-year-gap exists between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, or the period of life free of major chronic disease or disability. Experts at Oxford’s London Business School and Harvard suggest that extending that by just one healthy year of life is worth $38 trillion to the global economy. Extending healthy life by 10 years could net greater than $300 trillion. With the world’s population of people over the age of 60 expected to almost double from 12% to 22% by 2050, there’s a critical need to find novel solutions for healthy aging. It’s also part of a growing trend to  support “meaningful longevity.”

“It does not make any sense to have a long lifespan without being healthy,” said Chip Wilson, founder and chairman of SOLVE FSHD, co-title sponsor of EXPRIZE Healthspan. “Together, XPRIZE and SOLVE FSHD will enable people to discover global solutions.”

Long-Lived Animals Inspired Interest in Longevity

Diamandis said in a recent Longevity.Technology interview that his interest in longer, healthier living began in medical school. Watching a documentary on long-lived sea creatures, such as bowhead whales that can live 200 years and the Greenland shark with its 500-year lifespan, he wondered why couldn’t humans live that long?

The answer may be “something in the epigenic reprogramming, gene therapy and cellular medicine realms,” he said in a video interview. “While the winner is unlikely to be meditation, we’re not eliminating anything.”

Diamandis cited AI as chief among the tools available to participants in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition today, “but we’re going to see quantum chemistry and quantum computation in the second half of this decade and within the scope of this prize.

“I think we’ll know in the next two years the scope of the number of teams, and in four or five years’ time, we’ll begin to know who the top candidates are.”