XPRIZE named forty semifinalists today in its $101 million Healthspan competition, chosen from more than 600 teams in 58 countries. Each gets $250,000 to run a trial. To win, a team must show in a one-year clinical trial of older adults that its intervention restores muscle, cognitive and immune function — the stated ambition is roughly a decade of function regained. Trial data are due in April 2026, ten finalists are chosen that July, and a grand prize winner in 2030. The entries range from drugs to a team of Malaysian high-school students proposing community drum circles for older adults. We hope the drummers win.
Why the yardstick matters. Most of the longevity industry grades itself on biomarkers: a blood level moved, an epigenetic clock ticked back, a mouse lived longer. This prize grades on function — can an older person lift, think and fight infection better after a year — and on people, not animals. That is the standard the field should have been using all along, and it is the standard almost no product on the market has met. The prize is funded in part by Hevolution, the Saudi foundation whose summit we wrote about in February; whatever one thinks of the source, the criterion is right.
Ben’s takeA prize is the correct instrument when the market will not fund the experiment. No venture firm will pay for a drum circle trial; there is nothing to own at the end of it. A prize can. If a cheap, social, physical intervention outperforms a molecule on this yardstick — and the literature on movement and connection says it might — the longevity industry will have paid $101 million to prove the fundamentals. I would consider that money well spent.
Loree’s takeThree entrants caught my eye: GLP-1 drugs, metformin and drum circles. The first two have real evidence for specific conditions and almost none for healthy aging. The third is movement, rhythm and other people in a room. In a one-year trial measuring function in older adults, I know which one I would bet on, and I know which one no one will be able to patent afterward.
What to watch. Not the headlines in 2030. Watch April 2026, when the data arrive, and look for which teams report function and which report biomarkers. The ones that measured what the prize asked for are the ones worth reading. Everything else is a pitch deck with a trial attached.
Hold every longevity claim to this prize's yardstick: did it restore function in people, in a year? If not, it hasn't earned the word.