This community is in archive. Visit community.xprize.org for the current XPRIZE Community.
Competition structure
DavidPoli
Posts: 39 XPRIZE
We are considering an immune system-focused XPRIZE Age Reversal consisting of three rounds:
What are your thoughts on this overall structure?
- XPRIZE provides competitors, which can range in the hundreds, with an online community and online training in bio-entrepreneurship, exposing them to the science of longevity. Competitors do research on their intervention of choice, form start-ups, and submit a full proposal for Round 2.
- Up to 20 selected teams receive a milestone award and prepare to register their trials with the FDA, with help from a shared CRO.
- The teams whose trials are approved receive another milestone award and carry out Phase 2 clinical trials.
What are your thoughts on this overall structure?
0
Comments
We want to make sure that the competition is open to newcomers as well as established firms. Does this sound promising to you?
What would you be looking for, if you were interested in joining this competition, in terms of online community, online training in bio-entrepreneurship, and learning about the science of longevity?
You mention open to newcomers--to me that speaks to how you get the word out and where/who. The more diverse the better (across multiple criteria). The FDA component i found interesting. I am curious if that limits what participants think about in terms of solutions? Some tech--electric stimulation, light, and sound--that helps with physiological and mental health--doesn't necessarily need FDA approval (? not sure on that). Even VR and future tech applications may simply influence how we interact with our own body in more impactful ways. Just a thought...
As an entrepreneur I would want to be clear on the metrics that were being used to confirm progress, what are the constraints of the competition, and of course how long will it run for. Obviously longevity implies long term so I would think it needs to be 2 plus years (?). So to your point around online community and online training (with hopefully in person incubator type stuff for the learning when conditions allow); having access to expertise and funders and other entrepreneurs seems important. This could be as simple as a portal, but something with accountabilities and admins to regulate and guide where needed.
Helpful?
There would be detailed competition guidelines, telling (potential) competitors, in advance, exactly how they would be judged, and the judging would be done not by XPRIZE itself but by independent judges.
More info on why we're considering this direction for a longevity prize here (and please feel free to share your thoughts there as well!).
Thanks!
We can assume that methods for significantly extending robust health will unfold over the next few decades. For the vast population enduring, or at risk for age-related health problems, recovering youthful vitality is the imperative. Current demographics give priority to broad systemic revitalization – age reversal – for the billions poised to suffer and perish from age-related disease, with an understanding that the degenerations are rooted in several somewhat-independent pathways categorized by de Grey, Lopez-Otin, and others, and vary significantly from person to person. Additionally, some tissue is damaged mechanically, chemically, via genetic inheritance, or otherwise, with no inborn mechanism for amelioration, e.g., sickle cell anemia, the slow wearing down of adult teeth through chewing, or the accidental loss of a limb. Still, progress is inevitable.
Yes, we can join hands and sing sweet songs of geroscience advancement and agelessness just around the bend, but success is in the troublesome details. In a rational world, we would already be there. Instead, anti-aging medicine has been long undernourished by a sad soup of skimpy and spotty funding, ignorance, honest doubt, misguided spiritual rationales, political resistance, competing priorities, fear of the outcome, and fooled-once antipathy fueled by widespread injustice and sociopathy.
How can we break this logjam? We offer the most amazing breakthrough ever, yet cannot get traction in society. I am not a great businessman, but even I can see that this should be approached as a marketing and strategic planning problem. I thus humbly offer a springboard and some key concepts below, rooted in work last year trying to create an anti-aging ballot initiative, but heartily invite business experts to improve and advance it by any means necessary.
Marketing any product is greatly aided by a precise and intuitively-understood subject-matter lexicon. To our detriment, we often communicate poorly, especially to the masses, but also within the vanguard. An example of improving terminology is “healthspan” replacing “lifespan,” making the goal much more obvious to all by efficiently implying that high-maintenance survival without vitality or significant hope for improvement is not a worthy goal. …But in fact, even “health” is a vague, relative condition, albeit one that is kinda almost recognizable as a state of substantial functional ability relative to others and to one’s personal best. Johnson and Johnson came up with “immorbidity,” as a long-term objective. This might be better than “healthspan,” but is not yet widely used. Gero-related vocabulary includes many thousands of words, but only a handful (including “age reversal”) need harsh scrutiny for this marketing campaign. WHO has defined many relevant terms, but some need freshening. For example, WHO defines Healthy Ageing as “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age.” I feel weaker, just to read it! Super-precise, intuitively understandable, inspiring, durable words are needed. Perhaps a major conference could routinely force a side-meeting of luminaries, including linguists of the major languages, to establish and sustain standard subject-matter vernacular that clearly points toward a future where every adult’s health features indefinitely remain equal to or better than their wild-type best. In summary, well-chosen, consistently-applied terminology will accelerate the advent of greater healthspan/immorbidity/whatever, and is worth developing.
Economy is probably the biggest social motivator. We might wish for something less crass-sounding, but world peace, familial love, religious passion, freedom, romance, ethics, self-interest, and even survival often take a back seat to mammon. Realistically, this is largely because more money means more access to all that other fine stuff. Blood and gold have an ever-shifting, but ever-present equivalence, and denying it is sophomoric folly. The health-promoting community needs to embrace this primacy of economy, and manage our messaging accordingly. …But first, let’s set the stage.
Adverse features of biological aging begin affecting cells soon after conception, but are not usually thought of as bad because of an overarching growth and improvement of the organism that typically continues through puberty, and the robust repair and replacement mechanisms of the early years. Organismal health is a complex, interacting amalgam of processes that range down to biochemistry, and which will naturally be damaged and destroyed by any of a number of local failures that fan out and degrade other functions, ultimately killing the host. There might be an age at which an organism is at its overall peak, but every subsystem has an individual peak, all of which (excepting perhaps acquired cognitive skills – “wisdom”) are degrading faster than being repaired by early middle age.
As we go from zygote to old goat, physiological characteristics change. Bones grow quickly, then harden and grow slowly, then almost stabilize, then go brittle and shrink; hair emerges, changes texture and color, and is selectively shed; cognitive abilities and capabilities differentially rise and fall; sexual activity goes from zero, to warp speed, and back to a crawl; teeth emerge, fall out, emerge again, then terminally decay or wear away; etc. So, physiological capabilities variably fade, after peaking early in life. Time-dependent physiology is sometimes a good thing. Adults with gross congenital defects would likely prefer have them repaired without returning to the womb. …But maybe not always, if that option was available. This puts question marks all around the notion of age reversal, as touched upon in the terminology paragraph, above. Add to this mix both extant and predictable advances in “transhuman” medicine, from inoculations and dental fillings, to hormone-mediated regeneration, to artificial organs, stem-cell and nanobot therapies, and not-so-far-fetched-anymore superpower upgrades. All awesome and thrilling, but what’s in it for the economy?
Plenty, but we need to articulate and assertively disseminate that awareness! Besides joy and quality of life improvements beyond calculation, the immorbidity movement promises HUGE financial returns, and this is the selling point we need to emphasize.
From a quick Net search, looking only at the USA (where I live) for 2019, we have ~157M workers and a GDP of 21T, yielding an average GDP contribution/worker of >$133K for ~250 days of work (i.e., >$532/day/worker). Absenteeism is ~3.1%, ~50% of which can be attributed to poor health; call it 1.5%. ~10M working-age people are unemployed due to disabilities, and, lacking easily found numbers, estimate that 30% of those are due to chronic disease; 3M workers. Summing the losses due to illness:
(1.5% + 3M/157M) x $21T = $716B/year lost to illness = ~1.35B days of work lost
Estimating additional productivity sacrificed to care for these sick people, let’s call it 1.5B workdays lost to sickness in 2019, or ~8.5 days/worker/year.
Last year, a top geroscientist, known to everyone reading this, estimated for me that $4B of focused R&D would substantially solve the remaining aging riddles; not just for the USA, but for the entire world. This is <0.6% of the GDP lost to illness in the USA, alone, and here, comrades, is the primary talking point for our marketing program. If we fail miserably, and the $4B yields merely one day/year/worker of recovered absenteeism or disability, that yields an additional ($532 x 157M
Next comes strategic planning. Age reversal must be combined with preventive therapy, and deconstructed into its components. Those components must be subjected to a rigorous risk/benefit assessment that looks at the multiple layers of disease root causes, as well as number of people affected, average burden per affectee, popular perceptions, and proximity/expense of solutions. Though a trying task, this kind of detailed, careful, multi-disciplinary examination of biological aging is critical to optimizing the number of people saved from the ravages of aging.
Finally, “root cause” must be considered here, because few people understand what it implies. No matter your theory of aging, from accumulated 2nd Law damage, to programmed aging and death, there is layer upon layer of root cause, and competent medicine includes curing the disease at the lowest actionable root cause level. If your friend looks extraordinarily pale, you might offer rouge to “cure” the problem. Looking deeper, you might find that they are having digestive issues and not eating well, so you offer an antacid. OK, but why do they need this palliative medicine? You go to the doctor, and find they have a stomach tumor. Why? You might find they have a weak immune system that was unable to defeat the cancer. Why? You might find that age-associated involution of thymus left them incapable of destroying defective cells. Why? You might find that thymus involution is due to genetic or epigenetic programming that is usually harmless until the later years. Why? Perhaps the evolutionary environment or limitations of chemistry forced sacrifice of the thymus in favor of some other survival feature. Why? Why? Why? Ultimately, the pale complexion was caused by the Big Bang, but you cannot do anything about the Big Bang. …Thus, we must back up to the lowest actionable root cause for the most permanent possible therapy. Yes, apply the rouge, take the antacid, resect the tumor as necessary, but our very special mission lies in allaying the age-associated factors as permanently as practicable, by repairing the problem at the lowest actionable root cause. Better yet, anticipate the (broadly predictable) problem, and attend to that lowest actionable root cause before the morbidity becomes critical.
Cheers!
@Navonica, there's no link. We only have a high-level overview at this point as we explore directions for the prize.
Today, there are actually barriers to elder employment, nominally justified by nonsense economics that says elders must clear out to make room for youth. In fact, politics truly does tend to keep old-timers unfairly in power, but this only applies to certain sectors, and even in those sectors, the norms that stifle advancement of the most competent need to be reformed. In all cases, the paradigm must be shifted to incentivize gainful employment of willing and capable elders, without penalizing those who choose to or need to retire. This includes better options for part-time work, tax incentives to employers, better enhancement of social security benefits for those who retire later, etc.
Making this attractive is not difficult, and its benefits should be aggressively marketed. Using the numbers from above, even conservatively, yields eye-popping dividends. Assume 50 years of employment, 3.1M (157M/50) workers will retire annually. Healthy employees, late in their career are particularly productive, but using the $133k per-worker annual value creation average, we find that if the average elder worked a single year more than at present, fully $412B ($133k x 3.1M) of value would be added to the economy annually. That's 10,000,000 new Teslas. ...And that is just America, and does not count the benefits of being more fit in every way than today's workforce, with less people consumed taking care of sick elders. 'Nuf said?
But I don't think these are issues XPRIZE can directly address.