An X Prize competitors focusing on ageing has been within the works for years, fueled by discussions between Diamandis, longevity investor Sergey Younger, eccentric futurist and researcher Aubrey de Gray, and Michael Antonov, a long life fanatic and cofounder of the Fb-owned virtual-reality firm Oculus. Younger and Antonov offered seed funding to review the feasibility of the prize.
Diamandis introduced the $101 million prize in the present day on the International Healthspan Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, an occasion hosted by Hevolution, a nonprofit group launched by the Saudi royal household in 2021 that plans to spend a billion {dollars} a yr on ageing analysis. Hevolution is offering the most important chunk of the X Prize purse, $40 million. The opposite main funder is Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, who contributed $26 million to the prize. He additionally kicked in an extra $10 million for any workforce growing a remedy that may present a 10-year enchancment in muscle perform for people with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a muscle dysfunction that impacts Wilson and about 30,000 different folks worldwide.
The purse will likely be doled out in three chunks. Two years in, as many as 40 groups will obtain $250,000 “to anoint them as one of many prime groups,” Diamandis says. How these groups will likely be chosen isn’t but clear. However “it’s extra subjective than goal,” he provides. Three or 4 years in, the highest 10 groups will obtain one million every. That leaves $81 million for the winners, which will likely be introduced in 2030.
Any workforce that demonstrates a 20-year enchancment will obtain the total prize. A 15-year enchancment will earn $71 million. The prize for a 10-year enchancment is $61 million.
Gordon Lithgow, a researcher who research the biology of ageing on the Buck Institute, calls the announcement “incredible.” He hopes the prize would possibly deal with among the worst bottlenecks within the discipline: growing and testing new interventions, measuring ageing, and transferring analysis into people. “This discipline wants an enormous inflow of sources,” he says. Lithgow would possibly even put his hat within the ring.