Global competition enters clinical phase as selected teams work to restore immune, cognitive and muscular function in older adults.
The race to improve how long we live well has entered a new phase. XPRIZE Healthspan, the seven-year, $101 million global competition announced in late 2023, has unveiled its first cohort of semifinalists – 100 teams from 58 countries tasked with developing therapies to extend the years we spend in good health. With the selection comes not just recognition, but tangible support: the top 40 Healthspan teams and 8 focused on the FSHD (Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy) Bonus Prize have each received $250,000 to propel them into early-stage clinical trials.
The prize sets a clear goal: to restore muscular, cognitive and immune function by a minimum of ten years in adults aged 50 to 80, within a 12-month timeframe. It’s a challenging mandate, yet one that neatly reflects the evolving ethos of longevity science – less about aspirational immortality, more about physiological capacity and quality of life.
From over 600 registrants, the XPRIZE judging panel (which included Longevity.Technology CEO Phil Newman) has selected a strikingly diverse range of interventions. BioAge Labs is focusing on inflammation and metabolic dysfunction via NLRP3 inhibition; Longeveron Inc is trialing a mesenchymal stem cell therapy for age-related frailty; Timeline continues to develop its Urolithin A-based mitophagy activator. Other teams, such as NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity and Cyclarity Therapeutics, are deploying multi-modal or precision geroscience strategies, while firms like Rejuvenate Bio and R42 Group are turning to gene therapy and AI-guided systems biology.
“The next breakthrough in aging could come from scientists and entrepreneurs, anywhere,” said Peter Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. “With this prize, we’re igniting a global healthspan revolution, and these semifinalists are leading the charge.”
And while the competition is global in reach, the mechanisms are specific; entries are being judged on their potential to deliver measurable improvement in human function, not just promising pathways in animal models or preclinical studies.
“This competition isn’t just accelerating progress,” Diamandis added. “It’s shattering the limits of what’s possible when it comes to aging.”
Closing the gap between healthspan and lifespan
According to the World Health Organization, a 12-year gap currently separates life expectancy from healthy life expectancy in the United States. XPRIZE Healthspan, co-sponsored by the Hevolution Foundation and SOLVE FSHD, seeks to narrow that chasm – not by managing symptoms, but by targeting root causes of age-related decline.
“The next phase is critical,” said Dr Jamie Justice, Executive Director of XPRIZE Healthspan. “Our semifinalist teams are exploring a diverse array of strategies to extend healthspan, from biologics and devices to drugs, lifestyle interventions and personalised monitoring, coupling breakthrough innovations with feasibility and safety.”
As the 100 teams now move into the clinical stage, results will be evaluated in 2026. Ten finalists will be awarded a further $10 million milestone prize and advance to full clinical trials lasting up to a year. The overall winner – selected in 2030 – will receive up to $81 million. The University of Utah will serve as the Data Coordinating Center, a nod to the competition’s ambition to unify quality clinical evidence with scalable innovation.
Hevolution Foundation CEO Dr Mehmood Khan, whose organisation is the single-largest funder of the prize, said: “We are thrilled with the progress made at this pivotal prize milestone and are eager to see how these promising solutions evolve. Together, we are driving toward the goal to propel aging research forward globally and achieve medical breakthroughs to help humanity live healthier, longer.”
Longevity.Technology: The announcement of the XPRIZE Healthspan semifinalists marks a pivotal moment in the maturation of the longevity sector. Amid a cacophony of biohacking trends, supplement launches and AI-driven age estimates, this competition is beginning to cut through the noise – identifying credible, testable and translational solutions that may genuinely extend human healthspan. It’s not just the $101 million prize purse that makes this compelling; it’s the structure. By incentivizing robust clinical data and real-world physiological improvement – rather than speculative biomarkers or visionary optimism – XPRIZE is setting a new bar for what meaningful progress in aging should look like. The field’s growing diversity is on display here: mitochondrial peptides, senotherapeutics, immune reprogramming, traditional compounds reimagined through AI – all with the common goal of restoring lost resilience. This is the healthspan economy emerging, not from a single magic bullet, but from systems biology made tangible. Encouragingly, the competition is not only surfacing innovation – it is globalizing and democratizing it. That the next major breakthrough might come from a startup in Kuala Lumpur or a university in Montreal speaks to the breadth of the movement. As the race enters its clinical phase, the challenge will be to maintain rigor and resist hype. But the signal is getting stronger – and to find out more, we sat down with XPRIZE Healthspan Executive Director Dr Jamie Justice.
Charting a course through complexity
For Justice, the power of XPRIZE Healthspan lies not only in the solutions being proposed, but in the variety of strategies now subject to side-by-side testing – what she calls “targeted high-innovation strategies and scalable generalizable solutions.” While some teams are pushing forward with upstream modulators promising cascading downstream effects, others are opting for pragmatic multi-modal approaches – more immediately deployable and potentially less encumbered by regulatory complexity.
The competition’s design, she notes, deliberately supports this diversity. “Our judges prioritized innovation, body system-wide effects, generalizability, and clinical trial readiness,” Justice explains. “While monotherapies might seem disadvantaged by the requirement for multiple effects, many teams proposed single agents targeting upstream pathways with cascading benefits – including immune modulators, metabolic agents, and mitochondrial interventions.”
She acknowledges, however, that newer drugs or biologics face additional safety and testing demands – often the very distinction, she suggests, between Top 40 and Top 100 status. In contrast, platforms emerging from longevity clinics may benefit from existing human safety profiles and reduced scaling costs. “Even modest effects sustained long-term could significantly impact populations,” she adds, “though success in XPRIZE Healthspan demands improvements demonstrated in one year, and may require precise algorithmic matching of treatments to individuals.”
Global ambition, practical hurdles
Justice is equally attuned to the practicalities. The coming clinical phase will be defined, she says, by logistics and partnerships – rather than science alone. Teams will need to navigate regulatory environments, secure trial sites, manufacture product at scale and recruit participants swiftly. “The one-year timeframe to generate data in humans may seem trivial, but this is an accelerated timeline,” she notes. “The next round of competition is all about logistics, operations, and strategic partnerships.”
Financing remains another persistent constraint. Milestone awards are helpful, but rarely sufficient. Here, the broader XPRIZE infrastructure plays a supporting role – hosting investor summits, connecting teams with strategic partners and even interfacing with regulators. “XPRIZE is committed to more than just launching competitions,” Justice says. “We build a powerful ecosystem designed to help teams succeed.”
This ecosystem also supports diversity – not through artificial leveling, but through open access and incentive design. Justice notes that while some teams come with institutional backing or venture funding, smaller, leaner groups often prove nimbler. “The bank account and size of the top teams are not always what drive success,” she says. “In many cases the smaller teams are more agile and able to make quick decisions, or they can merge with other teams to capitalize on opportunities that large, better-funded teams cannot. In our history, the winning teams have surprised us, so it can be difficult to predict a winner by geographic region or commercial stage alone.”
That unpredictability is, in many ways, the point. The challenge of healthy aging is vast and universal, but the answers may emerge from unexpected quarters. In the years ahead, as therapies are tested not in theory but in aging bodies, the field will confront its defining question – not just what can be done, but what works, at scale, in time.
See all the semi-finalists find out more about their approaches HERE.
