I was reading in a book that the best way to make proper human trials for anti-aging medicine is the invention of proper biological clock tests that test aging effectively. It would shorten the length needed for trials for anti-aging.
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Yes - lots of people are working on this right now.
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I’m very glad longevity science is just going ahead on all fronts.
I can’t wait to read through all of the top 100 XPrize finalists health products.
There was one from Australia which is cool for me to see, Exomed, working on an orally bioavailable exosome product: “Exomed’s oral therapy employs regenerative xenogeneic extracellular vesicles from young bovine plasma to modulate key aging pathways. These EVs carry miRNAs and proteins that reduce systemic inflammation, enhance tissue repair, and rejuvenate stem cell function—mechanisms validated by heterochronic parabiosis research. Consumed daily, EVs resist GI degradation, enter circulation, and deliver both local and systemic benefits. Repeated dosing fosters oral tolerance, lowering immunogenic risks. By transmitting “youthful” signals, they recalibrate cellular aging, shifting epigenetic patterns and prompting tissue renewal, improved muscle strength, cognitive resilience, and immune competence. This progressive reprogramming maximises ones functional capacity throughout life.”
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Ok, no worries (extra char)
The XPRIZE Healthspan competition awarded $250,000 each to 40 breakthrough teams developing therapeutics for aging. With 600+ teams from 58 countries competing, we’re witnessing the largest coordinated effort to solve aging in human history.
The following teams have been selected to advance as XPRIZE Healthspan Top 40 Milestone 1 awardees:
A NEW DIMENSION, San Jose, CA
ABE YOANDO PHARMA CO LTD, Adachi, Tokyo, Japan
AGELESSRX, Ann Arbor, MI
ANI BIOME, San Francisco, CA
AUTOPHAGYGO, Osaka, Japan
BIOAGE LABS, California, USA
BIOARMOR, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
BOSTON HEALTHSPAN TEAM, Boston, MA
CANADIAN TRANSLATIONAL GEROSCIENCE NETWORK, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
CIRCADIAN, San Diego, CA
EXOMED, New South Wales, Australia
GI INNOVATION, Seoul, South Korea
GODA LAB, Bunkyo City, Tokyo, Japan
HEALTHY LONGEVITY CLINIC, Boca Raton, FL
INTERVENE IMMUNE, Los Angeles, CA,
PROMETHEUS CELL TEAM, Shanghai, China
REJUVENATION THROUGH LOW FREQUENCY ULTRASOUND, San Antonio, TX
RPRGAON-PROGERIA, Busan, South Korea
SANJEEVINI, Mumbai, India
TEAM GLYNAC, Houston, TX
THE HEALTHY BODY AND MIND, St. Louis, MO
TIME TRAVELER AND CURREIO, Tokyo, Japan
TIMELINE, Lausanne, Switzerland
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL INSTITUTE (IHU) HEALTHAGE, Occitanie, Haute Garonne
VITA, Barcelona, Spain
YOXLO, Oegstgeest, Netherlands JAPAN LONGEVITY CONSORTIUM, Tokyo, Japan
KIMERA LABS, Miami, FL
LIONHEART HEALTH INC, Newport Beach, CA
LOGIN (LONGEVITY INNOVATOR), Sendai Miyagi, Japan
LONGEVERON INC, Miami, FL
LONGEVITY IMMUNOTHERAPY, Irvine, CA
LONO JAEYAK, Gunsan Jeonbuk-do, South Korea
METFORMIN FOR HEALTHSPAN EXTENSION (METHEALTHSPAN), New York, NY
MINICIRCLE, Austin, TX
MITO-TAGS, Palo Alto, CA
MITOCHONDRIAL ALL-STARS, Needham, MA
MITOCHONDRIAL BIOENERGETICS AND KETONE UTILIZATION, San Diego, CA
NUS ACADEMY FOR HEALTHY LONGEVITY, Singapore
NYC-VITA, New York, NY
All semifinalist teams - Top 100 and late-registering teams included - will begin early stage clinical trials over the next year and will submit their data in April 2026 for the next round of judging in the Healthspan competition. Translating findings from the lab to clinical testing is a major hurdle for teams as it requires safety assessment, regulatory approval, testing partners, and investors or funders. In July 2026, XPRIZE will announce the 10 finalists selected to receive the second $10 million milestone prize. These teams will then advance to finals and must test their therapeutic solution for up to one year in adults aged 50-80 years in clinical trials, running from 2026 to 2029. The finalists’ trials will be supported by the University of Utah and its Data Coordinating Center (DCC), which will serve as the DCC for XPRIZE Healthspan. The competition will culminate in 2030, when the grand prize winner is awarded up to $81 million.
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Anyone know how this team plans to measure autophagy? This is the key issue…
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1. What XPRIZE Healthspan actually is
- XPRIZE is a nonprofit that runs large prize competitions to push capital and talent toward solving big problems.
- Jamie Justice is executive VP for health and executive director of the 101 million dollar Healthspan XPRIZE.
- The healthspan prize is solution agnostic: drug, device, lifestyle, gene therapy, combo approaches, whatever, as long as it is ethical, regulated, and testable in humans.
2. Core goal of the prize
- The winner must demonstrate a meaningful improvement in healthspan, defined functionally, not by epigenetic clocks.
- They focus on three pillars that real people care about:
- Cognitive function
- Physical / muscle function
- Immune function / resilience
- Teams must show a “plurality of effect” across these domains in a one year human trial, not just a single organ or disease.
3. How the competition is structured
- Global, open to almost anyone: academics, companies, clinics, even high school teams.
- Over 700 teams from 70+ countries started registration.
- First stage was “pen and paper” review of ideas, prior data, mechanisms, and feasibility.
- Top 100 selected, then top 40 each got 250k dollars as a milestone award in May 2025.
- Those 40 are not the only ones who can continue; any qualifying team that meets criteria by April 13, 2026 can still enter finals consideration.
4. What teams must do now
- Get regulatory and ethics approvals (IRB or equivalent), onboard a clinic, and recruit their first 5–10 people.
- Run a proof of concept trial (pocketable “POC”): show that the intervention is testable, reasonably safe, and can collect interpretable data.
- By April 2026 they must submit:
- Final trial design for a one year study
- De-identified data from the POC
- Recruitment / inclusion / screening reports
- Evidence they can follow protocol and handle data correctly
5. How the finals will work
- Judges expect maybe 40–50 solid applications for finals, then will choose 10 finalists.
- The top 10 each get 1 million dollars to offset trial costs.
- Final trials:
- Roughly 100 completers per team (cap maybe 200)
- One year duration
- Single crossover design where each person’s change is compared to their own baseline plus randomized control comparisons
- To “win,” a team likely needs something like 20–30 percent of treated participants achieving a large, predefined improvement in the healthspan metrics relative to a reference population and controls.
6. What kinds of solutions are being tested
Among the top 40 milestone winners, the mix is roughly:
- About 25 percent classic drugs
- Half repurposed, half novel
- About 25 percent biologics
- Gene therapies, cell therapies, plasma/exosome-type things, immunotherapies
- About 25 percent supplements / nutraceuticals / “other”
- About 25 percent multimodal / lifestyle and device combos
- Exercise, diet, circadian rhythm programs
- Meditation and stress reduction
- Heat, cold, hyperbaric, and other hormetic ideas
- Some with sophisticated algorithms or “digital twin” approaches
They also saw a ton of wild ideas in early applications: crystals, pheromones, even “pheromones of Jesus,” fish-inspired ideas involving eating offspring or roe, and other speculative concepts that did not pass scientific or ethical scrutiny.
7. Safety, offshore clinics, and the wild west
- Many gene therapy and peptide style clinics are already doing unapproved stuff offshore or in regulatory grey zones.
- XPRIZE is trying to bring rigor and transparency to this space by:
- Forcing teams to get proper ethics review and regulatory sign-off
- Running centralized data coordination through University of Utah
- Requiring adverse event reporting, shared safety labs, and stored blood samples
- Justice is realistic: some interventions are just harmless snake oil, others can be genuinely dangerous, so oversight is not optional.
8. Why they moved away from epigenetic clocks as primary readouts
- The original concept involved epigenetic clocks as the main endpoint.
- They pivoted because clocks alone are:
- Not yet sufficiently validated for clinical decision making
- Hard for regulators, clinicians, and the public to interpret
- Highly variable, with reproducibility and test–retest problems
- Justice sees them as “not perfect but sometimes useful” for research and conversation, but:
- Skeptical of direct-to-consumer biological age tests
- Thinks it is ethically questionable for clinicians to sell these tests and use them to drive care decisions when they are not clinically actionable.
9. Relationship to TAME and FDA
- Justice was deeply involved in the TAME trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin).
- TAME sought to show that one drug could delay multiple age related diseases using a composite outcome.
- It stalled due to:
- NIH peer review skepticism about the geroscience hypothesis
- Concerns about composite endpoints
- Metformin not being an exciting enough choice anymore
- Funding failing to fully materialize, especially after COVID diverted attention and money
- Key regulatory reality:
- FDA does not have a “desk for aging”
- It approves drugs for specific indications with defined clinical outcome assessments, not for “aging” as such
- You need both a credible outcome framework and a successful first trial before regulators will pattern match and accept similar designs later
- Justice frames the Healthspan XPRIZE as another route to build that human data and create precedents that might eventually support an FDA aging / healthspan context of use.
10. Biomarker companion prize idea
- Justice wants a second prize built on top of the main trial framework focused on biomarkers.
- Plan would be:
- Teams with promising biomarkers or devices piggyback on the finalist trials
- Use shared protocols, shared biorepository, and longitudinal data
- Try to identify biomarkers that predict healthspan response and track it over time across many different interventions
- That would create a powerful dataset to validate or refute clocks, blood-based scores, wearables, and other candidate biomarkers in real interventional trials.