PRGS&Tech is South Korea’s only team left in XPRIZE Healthspan’s $110 million race to prove a drug can help everyone age more slowly.
Part of a ten-part series profiling each of the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition’s Milestone 2 Awardees. Across the series, Longevity.Technology examines the science behind each team’s approach, the trial data supporting it and what stands between them and the competition’s final phase.
A drug originally built for children with a rare, fast-aging disease is now being watched as a possible answer to one of longevity science’s biggest open questions: can you actually slow aging down, and prove it, in a single year?
South Korean biotech PRGS&Tech has just cleared one of the toughest filters in that race. The company was named one of ten global Milestone 2 awardees in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, and it’s the only South Korean team left standing among them [1]. The award came with a $1 million prize and a spot in the finals, alongside six US teams, two from Japan and one from China.
XPRIZE Healthspan isn’t your typical innovation contest. Launched in 2023 by the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation with a $110 million prize pool, it’s a seven-year push to find therapies that can restore muscle function, cognition, and immune health in people aged 50 to 90 – and do it within a single year of treatment. The baseline goal is turning back the clock by ten years; the stretch goal is twenty. Whoever manages that most convincingly by 2030 stands to collect up to $81 million on top of what they’ve already won.
Roughly 600 teams from 58 countries entered. Last year, PRGS&Tech was one of 40 teams to reach the semifinal round and pick up a $250,000 Milestone 1 award. Clearing Milestone 2 meant surviving a much narrower cut, down to just ten teams worldwide.
PRGS&Tech’s entry, competing under the team name RPRGAON-PROGERIA, centers on a drug called Progerinin. It was originally developed to treat Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome and Werner Syndrome, two rare genetic conditions that cause the body to age at a dramatically accelerated rate. Progerinin is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials in the US, and it works by targeting progerin, an abnormal protein that’s known to speed up cellular aging.
That’s the detail that matters for longevity researchers well beyond the small population of patients with progeria. Rare, accelerated-aging diseases have long served as a kind of magnifying glass for scientists studying ordinary aging because when a single faulty protein visibly speeds up the aging process in a small number of patients, blocking that same protein becomes a plausible lead for slowing aging more broadly.
If Progerinin’s mechanism holds up outside progeria patients, PRGS&Tech’s XPRIZE bid is essentially asking whether a treatment built for an extreme case can be dialed down and applied to everyone else.
What’s next for the finalists
PRGS&Tech CEO Park Beom-jun attended the finalist award ceremony in Utah on 11 August, where the ten Milestone 2 teams begin four more years of evaluation before a winner is named in 2030.
“Being selected as the only finalist representing South Korea in a world-class bio-innovation project is a highly significant achievement,” Park said, calling it international recognition of Progerinin’s technology and competitiveness.
He was direct about where the company sees itself headed next.
“PRGS&Tech will not stop at developing treatments for rare diseases; we will continue to take on the challenge of developing innovative therapies that extend healthspan by addressing the root causes of aging,” Park said, adding that the company aims “to grow into a leading South Korean biotech company that competes in the global market through global clinical trials and commercialization.”
It’s a reminder of how porous the line has become between rare-disease research and mainstream longevity science. A drug developed to help children with progeria live longer, more functional lives is now sitting inside one of the most closely watched anti-aging competitions on the planet. And for the next four years, it will be judged not just on how well it treats one rare disease, but on whether it can move the needle on aging itself.
Photograph courtesy of PRGS&Tech
[1] http://eng.prgst.com/bbs/board.php?bo_table=news_media_en&wr_id=131
