An X Prize competition targeting aging has been in the works for years, fueled by discussions between Diamandis, longevity investor Sergey Young, eccentric futurist and researcher Aubrey de Grey, and Michael Antonov, a longevity enthusiast and cofounder of the Facebook-owned virtual-reality company Oculus. Young and Antonov provided seed funding to study the feasibility of the prize.
Diamandis announced the $101 million prize today at the Global Healthspan Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, an event hosted by Hevolution, a nonprofit organization launched by the Saudi royal family in 2021 that plans to spend a billion dollars a year on aging research. Hevolution is providing the largest chunk of the X Prize purse, $40 million. The other major funder is Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, who contributed $26 million to the prize. He also kicked in an additional $10 million for any team developing a therapy that can provide a 10-year improvement in muscle function for individuals with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a muscle disorder that affects Wilson and about 30,000 other people worldwide.
The purse will be doled out in three chunks. Two years in, as many as 40 teams will receive $250,000 “to anoint them as one of the top teams,” Diamandis says. How those teams will be chosen isn’t yet clear. But “it’s more subjective than objective,” he adds. Three or four years in, the top 10 teams will receive a million each. That leaves $81 million for the winners, which will be announced in 2030.
Any team that demonstrates a 20-year improvement will receive the full prize. A 15-year improvement will earn $71 million. The prize for a 10-year improvement is $61 million.
Gordon Lithgow, a researcher who studies the biology of aging at the Buck Institute, calls the announcement “fantastic.” He hopes the prize might address some of the worst bottlenecks in the field: developing and testing new interventions, measuring aging, and moving research into humans. “This field needs a vast influx of resources,” he says. Lithgow might even put his hat in the ring.