From global reach to breadth of innovation and approach, Dr Jamie Justice talks XPRIZE Healthspan progress.
Launched last year, the XPRIZE Healthspan is a $101 million global competition aimed at revolutionizing human aging. The winning team of must demonstrate that their solution restores muscle, cognitive and immune function by a minimum of 10 years, with a goal of 20 years, in people aged 50 to 80 years. Additionally, any treatment must take less than one year.
Submissions are flying in from all around the world, and with the Primary Registration Period closing tomorrow, we caught up with Dr Jamie Justice, Executive Vice President of the Health Domain at XPRIZE Foundation, to find out what has been happening so far – and something exciting happening in New York in 2025…
Jamie Justice on…
The numbers
554 teams have registered to complete from around the world – and they really are global., with 55 countries that are represented. One of the most thrilling parts is watching the global community come in and I love seeing the breadth and depth in the types of submissions – we’ve received over 165 qualifying submissions so far.
Innovative approaches
We have many teams that are working on “the basics of lifestyle intervention” (diet, sleep, exercise, &c) in isolation, but the majority are thinking of some kind lifestyle intervention in combination with either a drug, a gene therapy, an RNA-based therapy, stem cells or other biologics. A therapeutic coupled with recommended activity levels at the least. Some are actually looking at diets, either fasting-mimicking diets or some kind of food-clocking paradigm. Others are coming in with a lifestyle approach that is circadian rhythm-based, and again, it’s just a question of whether they’re going to put those lifestyle interventions in on their own, or if they’re looking to partner or couple with a company that might be working on something more novel.
I think the real catch there is going to be figuring out not just combinatorial approaches, which are very important for aging, but also how you can begin to personalize. We are not drawing restrictions on what teams should do – instead we are really letting them innovate and advance the field, which is quite exciting.
So it’s a very exciting time to be in the field – people are really looking upstream at the biology of aging and not going to any one system, which I would say is very much in the spirit of the prize. We’re asking people for solutions – however they get there is their business.
Good news for investors
For the top 40 teams there will be a unique benefit – we offer them a milestone award, which is a cash prize that’s unrestricted. It’s US$250,000 that they could use to help fund their studies or to do anything else they need. Those teams are going to be announced in May 12th-14th in New York City at an award ceremony. We’ll also be coupling that with an investor summit, so for anyone who’s investing in longevity, it would be a great spot to be! We’ll be doing a lot of matchmaking, so for those top 40 teams, if they are looking for funding and investors and connections, it’s a place for them to be made.
And for the investors that are in this space, a great perk of running a prize like this is in the absence of a regulatory approval process, we’re doing is inadvertently regulating through our judging process, providing diligence. So for investors, this is an alternate way that you can say that these are the teams that the field feels actually has something positive and strong that might bear fruit in its testing and that they’re ready for clinical trials.
