The contestants in a race to extend life are on their second lap.
In a seven-year global competition, teams are rushing to discover novel therapeutics and interventions that can extend human life by a decade and help people age well.
“We’re really pushing at a global scale for people to accelerate the process, so we can get real solutions in the hands of people who need them,” Jamie Justice, PhD, executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan, tells Fortune.
Teams from all over the globe, composed of students, university researchers, and even a Nobel Prize winner, are competing for the coveted prize, which will amount to $81 million.
Judges made up of leading researchers and scientists in the field assessed teams based on whether they illustrated “really solid innovation [on a] potential breakthrough that could affect all of the processes that underlie how we age,” says Justice. Teams had to show a readiness for clinical trials with strong evidence of an intervention that can be scaled to the broader population.
“We’re looking at solutions that can be proactive and can be generalized to a greater population, so that we can begin to address that gap at a population level,” Justice says.
Teams will submit data from their clinical trials by April of next year, ahead of XPRIZE selecting the top ten finalists in July of 2026, followed by the grand prize winner selected in 2030.
