With the deadline for submissions just around the corner, Jamie Justice, Executive Director of XPRIZE HealthSpan, explains to researchers still on the fence why they should contact her team now but also why missing the deadline is not the end of the world.
XPRIZE Foundation has been making history for 30 years with dozens of prizes in various fields, from space exploration to climate research. Symbolically, XPRIZE Healthspan, announced last year, is the biggest one yet, with a whopping $101 million in prize money that can go a long way in advancing the science of longevity.
We have previously discussed XPRIZE Healthspan with XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis and with Hevolution Foundation CEO Dr. Mehmood Khan. However, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of this giant enterprise, Jamie is the one to talk to, which we did.
Where does XPRIZE Healthspan stand as of now?
We’re just over one year since our launch. We spent our first six months in what we call the public comment period, getting advice from investigators worldwide. Then, we posted our competition guidelines and opened for primary registration – the primary chance for teams to submit qualifying submissions to advance into the competition.
Primary registration closes on December 20th officially, but we have opportunities for teams to come in later. They may not be able to advance through our first judging, but there are still opportunities to get involved, whether as a competitor or through our partnership ecosystem.
Just to clarify: a team will still be able to participate if they submit after December 20th, correct?
They will. Teams submitting after December 20th can still be considered as competitors. However, they might miss our first judging round, after which the top 40 teams will receive $250,000 each to help them advance in the competition. That’s what the December 20th deadline is really for – Milestone One judging. If a team wants to be considered for this, they need to communicate with us by that deadline so that their application can be reviewed in time. But missing this deadline doesn’t preclude teams from entering the competition; they just might not be eligible for these initial monetary awards.
We’re actually going to allow discretionary late registrations all the way to 2027. We know developing the next great idea takes time, especially for those looking to translate into human clinical trials. There are barriers that people might not know if they’re ready to overcome. Maybe they have something newer in development, they’re still doing preclinical work, and they’re on the fence about competing.
We want to encourage such teams to submit now. You can still be judged, and even if you don’t make the top 40, you already have your foot in the door. At no point are we trying to gatekeep, to close people out. They just need to have an open conversation with us and submit a letter of intent to continue.
So, you are encouraging teams to reach out to you.
Yes, email us at healthspan@xprize.org – that’s our team address. Let us know if you might have a late submission. All discretionary late registrations require a conversation with us first, where we ask them to submit a letter explaining why they’ll be late. We’ll determine if there’s an opportunity to move forward. For us, it’s just a matter of timing – we’ll have to form ad hoc judging panels to ensure they can meet goals along the way.
This is a $101 million global incentivized competition. For the grand prize, teams have to show they’ve restored muscle, cognitive, and/or immune function in older adults. The therapeutic must be administered in one year or less. To win, they have to demonstrate that their therapeutic can improve function by 10, 15, or 20 years. These are personalized response thresholds that individuals in their trial must meet. And yes, I said trial – people have to use clinical trials for the finals, which start in 2026.
Right now, we’re asking teams to submit for Milestone One – bring us their idea, tell us who they are as a team, where their testing center might be, where they propose to do clinical trials or what research stage they’re at. They need to detail their therapeutic, their preclinical evidence, what they’ve already done, and ideas about how it might work. It’s a pen-and-paper submission.
The 40 semifinalists will receive funding to continue and get to attend our milestone award summit, coupled with an investor summit. That’s the real prize for making top 40 – the chance to pitch their idea and potentially receive additional funding from investors, funders, or foundations interested in this area.
We’re going to give feedback to all teams who submit. The judges will tell them if there was a gap that needed to be met: “Great application, you might consider bringing in X expertise” or “You might consider finding a clinical research organization.” This is especially valuable for teams that are on the bubble, maybe missing the top 40 but still having an opportunity to make the finals.
How many teams have already applied, and what is their geographic makeup?
We’re at a fascinating point near our deadline. Our goal was 500 teams. My initial goal was 300, but Peter Diamandis said “no, 500,” and we bartered back and forth. Now, we have 510 teams who have at least registered their interest in competing.
Not all will submit qualifying submissions – some may start the process and realize they’re not ready or withdraw. We hope they’ll at least submit something for consideration. It would be sad for those who start with us to not make this final step.
These 510 teams come from 54 countries – we’re truly global. Our top five countries are United States, Canada, China, India, Japan, and United Kingdom (tied). Beyond that, we have strong representation from South Korea, France, Australia, South Africa, Switzerland, Brazil, Denmark, Spain, Israel, Turkey – those are our top 15. This global representation across continents reflects the global interest in aging and longevity research.
What is the distribution in terms of academia versus for-profits?
Right now, about 50% of our teams are for-profit. We’re approaching 18-20% academic teams, and that number keeps increasing as we get closer to the submission deadline. We have other nonprofit research organizations and numerous student-led teams – from middle school and high school to undergraduates and graduate students leading teams together. We also have biohacker groups that don’t quite fit any category.
Do you require teams to be legal entities?
We don’t exactly require this, but within our competition guidelines, you need some sort of established entity we can write a check to if you win. How that’s structured on the team’s side, we don’t determine. Some teams are collaborations between legal entities based on memorandums of agreement. Some are actual businesses. Others are figuring out creative ways to pull it together. Some are individuals who’ll name one person as their lead.
Does the prize structure advantage certain types of teams?
It does. We’re asking teams to develop therapeutics, which requires intellectual and infrastructure background to do research. Whether they’re a company, academic group, or small nonprofit, they need facilities. Part of our questionnaire asks if they can conduct clinical trials, if they have research and clinical space. This might make it more difficult for biohacker teams without centralized locations or clinics – not impossible, just challenging.
Interestingly, while academics usually make up 20-30% of registrants, as we know from previous XPRIZEs, they’re actually more likely to make it to the finals. They have certain advantages – support structures, core facilities, or business units built into their institutions, plus existing grant mechanisms they can leverage.
Still, many of our winners are companies. Companies have the advantage of being more nimble – it’s easier for them to pivot and maybe take something from their pipeline that fits. Some academic groups may not be so positioned.
What we’re seeing is a great opportunity for academic and industry teams to merge. Such partnership teams would probably have a distinct advantage – combining the fleet-footed principles from commercial space with academic resources and scientific expertise across both sectors could be a winning combination.
Can you give any advice to the competitors?
I think I did – contact us! If you’re on the fence, try it. Do it. This will be one of those competitions that if you don’t try, you won’t know. If you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, this qualifying submission is 12 pages” – make it shorter if you don’t have the time but put something together and try.
We have templates online, guidance documents, our email address, a Slack channel we’re monitoring almost 24/7 right now. Not many on my team are sleeping well these days, and we don’t plan to through December 20th. We’re really here for our teams. That’s the biggest advice I can give anyone – just try it. Don’t miss it by sitting on the fence wondering if your idea is good enough.
Can you expand on your endpoints? Making it about restoring function was an interesting decision.
We had to pick endpoints – muscle, cognitive, and immune – working with an endpoints committee to define measures that are simple, understandable, feasible to measure in trials, and show great potential. We established the criteria with our working group and advisory boards (this isn’t published yet, but there will be a scientific paper).
Those criteria consider several factors for each measure: face validity (does a measure of muscle power relate to muscle function?); relevance to biological aging (if the system is disrupted in animal models, is it fundamentally linked to biology?); association with chronological age across multiple populations; link to mortality risk, disease risk, and disability; longitudinal change over time; and responsiveness to intervention.
The hardest criterion for anyone to meet is showing that if it changes with intervention, is it a mediator of change in those events? No one has that because we don’t have enough clinical trials. For measures that haven’t met all criteria, like immune function, we had to decide: do we kick that measure out, or do we use the prize competition process as the means to actually develop the measures?
We’re filling in gaps along the way. What impact points do we need? What datasets are we missing? What consensus factors does the field need? We can use the prize to build momentum and pull people along – refining endpoints, getting measures, determining criteria, developing regulatory frameworks.
Our approach to trial design is particularly interesting. Traditionally, trials compare group averages – treatment group versus control group. That’s great for trials, and we love randomization, but at early stages, it can be challenging. We don’t take therapeutics based on the mean. Yes, maybe this group average is different than that group average, but is it meaningful?
What you’re saying is that the prize will advance the field regardless of the results, for instance, by improving our understanding of how to measure aging.
Yes, the prize gives the longevity field a chance to define what’s meaningful. What do we as scientists, experts, and drug developers think is important? The magnitude of effects we’re choosing – 10 years, 20 years – these are just numbers until we build references behind them. How do we do that?
What is meaningful for a clinician when treating an individual? Clinicians aren’t prescribing to the average, they’re prescribing to someone specific. After that person started the intervention, we need to look at individualized response over time. Did this person improve relative to themselves?
That’s not necessarily how we think in early stages of translation, but it’s how we need to think about applying these therapeutics. We have a chance with this prize to develop those references and consider what matters to individuals, clinicians, stakeholders, and companies that might acquire or de-risk larger trials.
For Milestones one and two, we left a lot up to our teams, but for finals, some things are fixed. We’ll have a data coordinating center, and we feel strongly about the personalized response threshold approach. This requires a particular structure – teams need multiple baseline points before randomization to either drug or control. They can do whatever they want during their intervention period, but we need multiple follow-up points.
Those multiple baseline points before randomization are crucial because we need to know how variable people are in their day-to-day. We need a solid baseline because that person becomes their own control group. When setting thresholds, we’re looking at how they compare to themselves, not to somebody else.
Some parts are absolutely a work in progress – like the biomarkers for immune function. I’ve been on a warpath for a year about this and will continue. By the time we open for finals, I want a biomarkers bonus prize.
A bonus prize is an interesting idea, especially for developing biomarkers of aging, which is a pressing need in our field. This brings me to the question: is the prize open to additional sponsors?
Absolutely. We hope to announce soon an additional sponsor helping with operations. I’d love to have an additional sponsor help put together a biomarker bonus prize. It doesn’t need to be $100 million. It just needs to be enough to get people to chase it. Think of how many people we have to sign up for one-year trials. A biomarker prize would be asking for much less.
We also have opportunities for sponsors to help with marketing, events, documentaries. One big thing XPRIZE does is democratize science. We want public engagement. We’re looking for opportunities for events and outreach, especially to groups that don’t typically compete in prizes like this – student groups or teams from lower or middle-income countries that might not have the resources of larger universities and countries in the West.
There are many sponsorship opportunities, if not through XPRIZE, then to individual teams and groups doing the work. If anybody’s interested in making those contributions, we’d be happy to help make connections and get people engaged. Teams need it. The field needs it.
You seem fired up about this project. What does it mean to you personally?
I am hugely excited about this. I was about to turn in my promotion materials when I got this call from XPRIZE to lead the prize that aligned with my scientific work. It was the biggest bet of my life.
It seemed like a huge risk, relying on the global community to come up and support it. We’re decentralizing not just any science, but the science of longevity. It’s a wild concept – crowdsourcing the greatest innovations that we think will change how we live and age.
To go through this process over the last year and have huge public reception, to have 500 teams sign up, to get sponsors to sign on and have partners like Lifespan.io joining us – it’s actually working. We’re just at the start line, but we have people who’ve shown up with us. It’s remarkable.
I was on a call this afternoon with Dr. Lauren Pierpoint, who’s a biostatistician and epidemiologist. She similarly took a bet on XPRIZE, leaving her career. We were going through team submissions and metadata, and she just started giggling and said, “Jamie, it’s working.” We’re just at the start – there’s so much left to do in the next six years – but that we could at least get to this stage speaks volumes.
We received some information after this interview was completed:
XPRIZE Healthspan closes primary registration on Friday, 20 December 2024, but we are extending the deadline for Qualifying Submission upload until 31 December 2024.
This means teams need to go enter their team and contact information on our registration website by 20 December (https://pop.xprize.org/prizes/healthspan/overview) . Teams with an active registration profile will be able to access the portal and complete their ~12-pg Qualifying Submission until the platform closes at 7pm PT on 12/31/24. But teams who wait are at their own risk as our offices are not staffed over the Holidays; there is no guarantee of technical or scientific support for Qualifying Submissions after 20 December.
View the article at lifespan.io
