Twenty finalists, ten million dollars, and a yardstick that hasn't moved

XPRIZE named twenty finalists today in its $101 million Healthspan competition, ten of them receiving $1 million milestone awards. When we wrote about the forty semifinalists in May of last year, we said the thing to watch was the yardstick: to win, a team has to restore muscle, cognitive and immune function in adults aged 50 to 90 by the equivalent of at least ten years, within a year of treatment, in a clinical trial. The yardstick has not moved. The finalists now run trials of up to a year each through 2029, with a university data-coordinating center and shared labs managing the measurements, and up to $81 million is awarded in 2030. The ten named awardees are drug, biologic, cell-therapy, gene-therapy, extracellular-vesicle and AI-guided precision-health teams from the United States, Japan, South Korea and China.

What changed, and what didn't. The semifinalist field we described last year included teams proposing community drum circles alongside teams proposing metformin and GLP-1 drugs; the ten awardees named today are companies and university labs with molecules, cells and algorithms. We cannot tell you whether the drummers are among the ten unnamed finalists. What we can say is that the trial design now in place — one year, functional endpoints, older adults, independent data coordination — is the hardest test the longevity industry has ever agreed to sit, and that it is the test every product sold to you with the word "healthspan" on it has skipped.

Ben’s take

The prize is now doing something more useful than paying a winner: it is building trial infrastructure that the field never had, a shared data center and shared biomarker labs across twenty trials with one yardstick. That is public-goods work that venture money does not fund. When the data arrive in 2029, the most valuable output will not be the winner. It will be twenty honest nulls and a method for producing more of them.

Loree’s take

Ten years of restored function in a year is an enormous bar, and I expect most of these teams to miss it, which is fine — the point of a bar is to be measured against. What I will be reading in 2029 is the function data: did older adults get stronger, think more clearly and fight infection better? If a cheap intervention does that, the prize will have proven a fundamental. If only an expensive one does, we will know the price of the gap.

What to watch. The trials begin now and run three years. Between now and then, expect finalist status to appear in marketing — "XPRIZE finalist" on a website is a claim about being allowed to take the test, not about passing it. The results, when they come, will be the first head-to-head functional comparison of longevity interventions in people. That is worth the wait.