XPRIZE Healthspan aims to add scientific rigor to longevity studies

BERKELEY, Calif. — Jamie Justice is an anti-aging researcher with a name fit for a superhero and a grand mission to match. A few years ago, she left her tenure-track job at Wake Forest University to team up with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis on XPRIZE Healthspan — a $101 million global competition meant to identify therapeutic treatments that can restore muscle, cognition, and immune function in older adults.

“There’s a booming market for slowing aging, but there’s no way to tell if [treatments] work,” Justice said onstage at the longevity conference Vitalist Bay here this month. XPRIZE Healthspan, for which she serves as executive director, was created to bridge that gap. The 10 teams selected from a pool of 40 this year will be required to test out their therapies in yearlong randomized controlled clinical trials before the winner of the grand prize is announced in 2030. 

Dressed in wide-legged jeans and a dark blazer, Justice walked the audience through XPRIZE competitors’ varying approaches to longevity. Exercise, senolytics (drugs that target damaged “zombie” cells that increase as we age), and personalized medicine geared toward biomarkers were among some of the prevailing approaches.

The longevity field, as the people involved in it acknowledge, tends to attract colorful characters with far-out theories. (A man in a purple cape trotted regally through the grounds of Vitalist Bay.) Figures like Justice, who’s hung onto her academic ties as an adjunct assistant professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest, occupy a more grounded, science-based part of the spectrum. But she welcomes a big-tent approach to the world of anti-aging research. “I think, as scientists, we have to be really mindful to not turn into gatekeepers,” she told STAT during an interview after her talk.

STAT sat down with Justice to learn more about the XPRIZE Healthspan competitors, research on what people really want in their old age, and the problem of “purely scammy” companies giving longevity a bad name.