XPRIZE Healthspan

A seven-year global competition, with a $101 million purse, to develop therapeutic treatments to help people live longer and healthier lives.

The XPrize Foundation is a non-profit organisation which designs and operates competitions with the aim of encouraging technological development for the benefit of humankind. XPRIZES are cash rewards paid to the first participant to achieve a pre-determined goal, and are intended to accomplish three main objectives:

• Attract investment to generate new approaches to difficult problems.
• Create significant results that are real and meaningful. Competitions have measurable goals, and are created to promote adoption of the innovation.
• Cross national and disciplinary boundaries to encourage teams around the world to invest the intellectual and financial capital required to solve difficult challenges.

The XPRIZE Healthspan competition has been launched to find novel solutions for healthy aging. The global competition invites teams to develop and test therapeutics that restore muscle, cognition, and immune function by a minimum of 10 years, with a goal of 20 years, in persons aged 65-80 within 12 or fewer months of treatment. The objective is to incentivise hundreds of independent teams around the world to test this hypothesis in clinical trials using a variety of therapeutic treatments, including but not limited to drugs, biologics, gene therapies, devices, dietary or lifestyle approaches, administered alone or in combination.

The competition has four primary objectives it hopes to achieve:

• Demonstrate that therapeutic treatments can restore functional ability typically lost during aging in humans.
• Build consensus on methodologies to measure functional and biological aging.
• Generate global interest in research and commercial implementation of healthspan extension, by inspiring and guiding individuals, companies, academic teams, and researchers to engage in this XPRIZE. 
• Stimulate public discourse and drive regulatory reform while educating the public, scientists, key stakeholders, and leaders.

The competition consists of two parallel testing and awarding tracks: XPRIZE Healthspan and XPRIZE FSHD Bonus Prize.

• XPRIZE Healthspan is a seven-year $101 million incentivised competition that includes two milestone prizes awarded in recognition of research and development and proof-of-concept testing phases, and culminates in final adjudication of the Grand Prize based on testing interventions in a diverse cohort of individuals aged 65-80 years.
• FSHD Bonus Prize focuses on Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD) based on testing interventions in genetically confirmed FSHD individuals aged 50-80 years.

Teams may register to compete in one or both tracks.