Ten teams receive $1m awards as the $101m competition moves from therapeutic promise towards coordinated human trials.
XPRIZE Healthspan has selected 20 finalists to advance to the clinical phase of its seven-year, $101 million competition, with ten teams receiving $1 million Milestone 2 awards to support further development and testing of interventions targeting age-related functional decline.
The finalists span a deliberately heterogeneous field of therapeutic strategies, but share an unusually concrete objective. Between 2026 and 2029, they will conduct trials lasting up to one year in adults aged 50 to 90, seeking to restore muscle, cognitive and immune function lost through at least ten years of age-related decline; 20 years remains the more ambitious target.
Longevity.Technology: Back in 2023, when XPRIZE Healthspan was launched, we said the competition was effectively throwing down the gauntlet to the longevity sector: prove that your technology actually works. Three years later, with 20 finalists selected and the clinical phase ahead, now comes the proving. The breadth of approaches still in contention is striking – from repurposed drugs and personalized combination therapies to stem cells, mitochondrial interventions, genetic approaches and extracellular vesicles – but mechanism, however elegant, is no longer enough; what matters now is whether any of them can deliver meaningful improvements in muscle, cognitive and immune function in humans, and do so within a year.
That emphasis on function is important. Aging research has no shortage of intriguing biomarkers, encouraging animal data or biological-age readouts that move gratifyingly in the desired direction; improving how an older person actually thinks, moves and responds immunologically is a considerably higher bar, and a rather harder result to explain away. XPRIZE’s ambition of restoring function equivalent to at least ten years of age-related decline – and potentially 20 – is deliberately audacious, although ‘20 years younger’ should not be mistaken for literal rejuvenation of the whole organism; the competition is testing defined functional domains, not issuing replacement birth certificates. Perhaps just as consequential, however, is the infrastructure being built around the trials: coordinated data management, centralized laboratory testing and shared biomarkers offer an opportunity to produce something geroscience has badly needed – rigorous, comparable human evidence. There may ultimately be an $81 million winner, but XPRIZE Healthspan’s larger legacy could be establishing a more demanding answer to one of longevity’s simplest and most troublesome questions: does it actually work?
Ten teams take $1 million apiece
The ten Milestone 2 awardees, selected on scientific rationale, scalability and accessibility as well as readiness for clinical testing, are:
AgelessRx, US
Goda Lab (NanoTitan / University of Tokyo / Tokyo RELIFE Clinic), Japan
Johns Hopkins-Suninflam (Suninflam Inc & Johns Hopkins University), US
Longeveron, Inc, US
Minicircle Inc, US
Mitochondrial All Stars (Mighty Therapeutics Holdings Inc / University of Washington), US
NYC-Vita (Mount Sinai Health System), US
RETRO-EPIGERNA (Macau University of Science and Technology), Macao SAR, China
RPRGAON-Progeria (PRG S&Tech), South Korea
TIME TRAVELER – Plant-EVs, Japan
Each receives $1 million in prize funding alongside access to clinical testing resources; the remaining ten finalists progress in the competition without a Milestone 2 cash award. The additional ten finalists are:
Lono Jaeyak
Boston Healthspan Team
Morinaga Healthspan
Abe Yoando Pharma
NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity
Japan Longevity Consortium
GOQii Sanjeevini
ASU Team Healthspan
GI Innovation
ANI Biome
“Today marks a pivotal milestone for XPRIZE Healthspan and the future of healthy aging,” said Peter Diamandis, MD, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. “It is inspiring to see the breadth of scientific approaches our finalist teams are advancing to tackle one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Each team is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, bringing us closer to breakthroughs that could transform how we age and help more people live healthier, more active lives.”
That breadth is considerable. The finalist field encompasses interventions targeting metabolism, inflammation, tissue repair and neuroprotection alongside mitochondrial therapeutics, biologics, stem cell approaches, transient genetic interventions and extracellular vesicles; at the less technologically exotic end of the spectrum are food and plant-derived bioactives and personalized programs combining existing medicines, nutraceuticals and exercise.
For Jamie Justice, PhD, executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan, the next stage is fundamentally about evidence. “As these teams move into coordinated clinical trials, they are generating the evidence needed to redefine what’s possible for healthy aging while helping establish a higher standard for clinical validation.”
Running alongside the main prize is a smaller, sharper one: a $10 million FSHD Bonus Prize, reserved for any team that can restore muscle function lost to Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy within a year. It is backed by Chip Wilson, the Lululemon founder and now chairman of SOLVE FSHD, who lives with the condition himself; his stake in the outcome is rather more literal than most sponsors’, and “we need to move faster toward transformative treatments” reads less like boilerplate and more like a deadline he is personally waiting on.
A common ruler for different science
Comparing such different modalities presents its own scientific problem. The University of Utah Data Coordinating Center will oversee centralized data management, while UC San Diego’s Stein Institute for Research on Aging will coordinate laboratory testing, biomarker analysis and biospecimen storage. Justice told Longevity.Technology that all teams will use these centralized resources and common outcome measures, while continuing to operate under the regulatory and ethical requirements of their respective jurisdictions.
Accessibility is also baked into the judging. Speaking to Longevity.Technology ahead of the announcement, Justice said judges consider “the whole picture”, including efficacy, safety, manufacturability and whether costs permit realistic scale; those considerations will remain central during the clinical phase. It is an important constraint for a competition predicated not merely on extending healthspan, but on finding interventions capable of doing so beyond a small, well-resourced patient population.
Where the finish line moves
The competition is scheduled to conclude in 2030, with the Grand Prize indexed to the magnitude of functional improvement demonstrated: $61 million for improvement equivalent to ten years of age-related decline, $71 million for 15 years and up to $81 million for 20 years. The largest award requires conclusive improvement across all three domains – muscle, cognition and immunity.
For now, however, the narrowing field marks a change in tempo. The hypotheses have survived selection; soon, they must survive humans.
READ MORE: ‘Judges are looking at the whole picture’ – we speak to XPRIZE Healthspan Executive Chairman Dr Jamie Justice about the finalists and the competition could mean for the future of healthspan innovation.
