 Investing in the Fountain of Youth, that's the goal of the recently announced $101 million dollar XPRIZE health span competition. The challenge is for teams to develop a treatment that can reverse aging by 10 to 20 years. The treatment also has to work in people aged 65 to 80 and it needs to show results within one year and the winner is going to be chosen by 2030. In this video, we're going to look at who funded the prize, the nitty gritty on the rules for winning. Can it even be won in that timeframe? Who's competing and who should be competing? Welcome to Lifespan News. I'm your host, Emmett Short. If you like this content, think about hitting the like, subscribing, or heading over to lifespan.io, reading all our articles on longevity there, maybe donating. It does help us create more content like this. And that is what it's going to take to solve aging and that tends to give people a lot of feels because no matter where the money comes from, someone's always upset. You know, it's either tech bros are trying to live forever or the government is up to no good or crypto is a scam. But when grandma has macular degeneration, it's tech bro Davidson that's got an aging based cure that's worked in primates. It's moving to human trials. He's the one going to fix it. You could check out a video on that right up here. And let's say you need knee surgery or instead they could just regrow the tissue inside your knee. Well, the government's ARPA H is funding research into that. You can see a video for that right here. And if you're not completely against crypto after the devastating 2022 crash, you can watch our founder Keith Kamito talk about how decentralized science could completely change the way age related research is funded. Also video right here. Okay, so Peter Diamandis is the founder of XPRIZE and here he is explaining the rules. This is a seven year competition. It's launched here in 2023 with a culmination by 2030. It might be one before then, but that's the end goal. People like having a end that drives them to take action to win this. You need to develop a therapeutic treatment that you can deliver in one year or less. If your therapeutic treatment takes a day, fantastic. You need a year, you can take the whole year. And with that treatment, we want you to restore lost function in immune, muscle and cognition by at least 10 years. The most important word he said in that whole spiel was the word and muscle, brain and immune. All of them. You can't win with just muscle or just brain or just immune. This is pretty important because most likely this means teams will have to join forces and collaborate in order to win the money. It's like the board game risk. There's no rule against making alliances. It's totally valid. You could tell your cousin, hey, if you don't invade South America, I'll drive you to the airport. This is the XPRIZE HealthSpan website. The sponsors are these three right here. Evolution, Solve FSHD and Senogens. Solve FSHD is actually funded by Chip Wilson. He's a Canadian businessman, started Lululemon. And Chip is actually committing a hundred million dollars to Solve FSHD, which he has. It's a muscle degeneration disease. So that's the story there. Senogens is one I can't really figure out. This is their website. Apparently they make apricot, angel, lip scents, hydrangea. I don't know what a company like this is doing as one of the main sponsors of XPRIZE. Are they curing aging with eye shadow? I don't know what's going on, but that is the same logo. So Senogens wants in on aging. Fine. Now, some people have said that this sponsor, Evolution, which is funding the majority of the XPRIZE, is problematic because, as you can see, the Evolution Foundation was actually started by the Saudi monarchy. So Saudi Arabia is set to invest a billion into anti-aging and they're doing it through the Evolution Foundation. So some people have a problem with XPRIZE taking money from basically a government that has a bad track record of human rights issues. They basically killed that journalist. They imprisoned people for speaking out against the government on Twitter. If you're concerned about this, I hear you. Look, I'm not trying to stick up for the Saudi Arabian government, but this money could actually do some good. I want to know your opinion. Do you think this is right? Do you think we should use this money? Talk about it in the comments. I'll join you there. Can an age reversal XPRIZE even be won in 2030? This prize can definitely be won in the timeframe we're going to have here. I'm one of the optimists in terms of, I think 10 years is going to be definitely doable. We're at this particular time in 2023, just like digital was in 1995, where we're at an inflection point, an exponential inflection point in the science that we have. And this is exactly what's needed to take it to the next level. This decade is different than any other decade. This decade, we have democratized and we're demonetizing the tools to enable entrepreneurs and scientists and small teams to do what only governments and the largest corporations could do before with compute with AI soon with quantum chemistry and quantum compute. We're in the midst of achieving exponential improvements in reading, writing and editing genomes. We also have epigenetic reprogramming of developmental biology is progressing both backwards from 80 year old cells to embryo like cells and forwards to essentially any tissue type sold. So who are these optimistic people who think aging can be cured by 2030 and who want to win $101 million to do it and think they can. Let's meet the earliest contestants. Matt Caberline, CEO of OptiSpan currently on a mission to test 1 million molecules with AI. The million molecule challenge is really an attempt to address what I view as probably the most limiting problem in the field today. And that's stagnation in discovery of new longevity interventions. Nobody has found a drug pharmacological intervention more robust and reproducible than rapamycin really in the last 15 years. Why is it that the field isn't breaking the longevity world record every month or at least every year or at least every decade? And I think the answer is probably in large part because most of the people in the field are studying what we think we already know within the framework of the hallmarks of aging and I call that looking under the longevity lamppost. And those kinds of studies are important, right? It's important to flesh out the details. It's important to start to translate that knowledge to the clinic. But if we don't look outside the lamppost, we're never going to find the aging biology that we don't understand yet. And that's really the foundation for enabling the million molecule challenge. Mitchell Lee, CEO of Aura Biomedical, inventor of the Wyrmbot for testing drugs on worms at scale. Wyrmbot offers a novel, high-throughput robotic approach for studying aging and other processes in C. elegans. C. elegans is cultured in growth medium in a standard 12-well tissue culture plate. Specific studies, including drug screening, can then be performed. To begin imaging, the plates are held by steel dowel pins on a clear acrylic optical table. The device can record brief 30 frames per second movies every day. The setup is connected to a workstation that stores the data captured. The neural network interprets each high-resolution image in order to determine the position of each individual animal in the field of view. Next, a predictive algorithm assigns a unique identifier to each animal and tracks its location over time. From this tracking data, time of death for each animal is determined based on characteristics of its size, shape and motion. I've got a Wyrmbot, but it works very differently. Andrea Mayer, University of Singapore's Director of Longevity Research. Really focusing on two things. And that's the first, that's the diagnostics. And what do I mean with diagnostics? How old are you really? What is the biological age in humans? We also do that in mice and sea elegans and zebrafish, etc. But in the end, we have to translate that into humans. But what we also now know is that the aging process within a body is very diverse. My heart, my brain, my lungs might age quite differently. So it's very important getting into the grip on what is the aging phenotype of somebody to then give the right intervention. Laura Nidenhofer from the University of Minnesota focusing on aging biology. What we have been really focused on in our institute is screening drugs. So innovative assays to screen for drugs. And we're particularly focused on senescent cells, which are these cranky pro inflammatory cells that we accumulate as we age. And we know they cause aging. We know they cause disease. I'm really engaged in AI because there's going to be so much incredible data about which types of senescent cells we need to target. We're very interested in how immunosolescence as well as senescent immune cells, which are different, contribute to the aging process. Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute, which is basically a biotech startup incubator. Easy to increase the lifespan of a mice, of mice and model systems. And we do this routinely in the lab. But when you go into humans, there's an enormous barrier of safety. And frankly, we're trying to rewrite the rules of medicine, how research is done and how clinical trials are done. And George Church, a Harvard geneticist with multiple breakthroughs in genetics and bioengineering. We've successfully engineered pig genomes at 69 genomic sites, not just to address the organ shortage crisis, but also to make enhanced organs resistant to senescence cancer and immune overreaction. We've made a combination therapies and multiplex testing of reversal of multiple age-related diseases already in mice, dogs, and soon primates and human clinical trials. We're not looking at longevity or biomarker tests, but functional restoration. So those were the competitors that were announced during the launch, but they already have a ton of teams that have signed up, including this guy who claims to be the Singapore Benjamin Button, whose cutting edge method for solving aging is apparently getting you to work out with him and eat his food and yeah, buy his supplements. I don't know. I mean, for a contest with such a high bar for winning, you'd think the bar for entering the contest would be a little higher than any lifestyle influencer who's got a six pack, a white label protein powder, and zero fucks to give. But that's just me. Who do you guys think should be competing? There are some pretty big names in the field, conspicuously absent, like Sam Altman has funded retro biosciences, I think by himself with the explicit goal of solving aging. To Sarah Therapeutics has the same parent company as Moderna. They're a private company researching retro transposons and mobile genetic elements. These are gene writing solutions that I'm definitely planning on doing a video on soon. Brian Johnson's out there posting on social every day about how young his various tissues are and with the amount of money he's pouring into himself. He could probably use 101 million bucks. And of course, there is David Sinclair, the other Harvard researcher with the Yamanaka factors. David is starting human trials to reverse age-related blindness. So why George Church but no David Sinclair? Then there's the SENS Research Foundation, which is basically another incubator funding all sorts of moonshots. So what do you think? Is anyone going to even win this money? Is this just a way for evolution to get some good PR without actually ponying up the cash? Who should be in this contest that I didn't mention? Let us know in the comments. I'll be in there with you. Listen, it's the end of the year. Tax season is coming up. If you're looking for a suite right off and want to support our mission of longevity, advocacy, and research, definitely check out lifespan.io and make a donation. Otherwise, just think about hooking us up with a like or subscribe. And if you want more videos like this, definitely watch this one right here, whatever one that is. And thanks for watching Lifespan News. I'm Edmund Short. See you in the next one.