This is one outlet's own report from Time — the article as it was filed.
AIPROPX ReportTime · 2d ago
Which Anti-Aging Ideas Actually Work? XPrize Healthspan Is Testing The Best Longevity Innovations
XPrize Healthspan is testing the best ideas for slowing aging. —Elena Noviello—Getty
Jamie Justice admits she has no poker face. As executive director of XPrize Healthspan, a philanthropic and corporate sponsored competition, Justice oversees one of the most buzz-worthy science competitions today. The contest, launched in 2023, attracted nearly 200 applicants from groups around the world who think they can help people to live not just longer lives , but healthier ones.
When the 15-member judging panel met in early summer to pick the top 10 teams who would continue on in the seven-year competition, Justice excused herself. “I couldn’t be in the room because my face shows everything,” she says, since she became familiar with each of the teams and their various approaches to extending human life.
Both in the scientific community and the commercial market, there is no shortage of ideas—from legitimate, rigorously developed approaches to more fantastical schemes—for a fountain of youth . XPrize Healthspan exists to bring some order to that chaos, and legitimacy to the process of developing and, most importantly, testing ideas in longevity. Applicants for the prize, which has a total purse of $101 million, allocated in segments throughout the seven-year competition, included teams from academic research institutes as well as biotech and startup groups. All had to follow a few basic rules; they had to show early promise in human studies that their approach could improve health in three critical areas: muscle function, brain function, and immune function. All teams were judged based on standard measurements of these three functions that XPrize committees of experts had specified, to ensure that all projects were evaluated using the same metrics. The judges announced the top 10 projects on Aug. 11.
“This is where I get the most excited, when things get really sort of dirty and ugly,” says Justice, who spent time researching geroscience at Wake Forest University before coming to XPrize. “You’ve got biohackers selling you this, and you have a bro guy over here that wants you to take so much protein that you’re going to die. What we need to do is have a strainer, a filter where everybody is held to the same standard. There may be something really worthwhile and useful out of some of these things that seem harebrained. What XPrize does well is invite everyone in, teach them how to do the science to get to a level of super credibility. It’s an alliance that comes together to set the frameworks for the start line, a finish line, and how to get there.”
The projects are as varied as you might expect approaches to longevity to be—ranging from the latest anti-aging trends in Asia involving extracellular vesicles, to stem cells and more traditional, well-established programs that include exercise and supplements. Two of the teams are from Japan, one from South Korea, one from China and six from the U.S. Two of the groups are studying repurposed drugs for their potential in extending life, while the Korean team is investigating a novel longevity drug. Four projects involve supplements and five rely on biologic compounds including extracellular vesicles, peptides, and antibodies.
Both teams from Japan are working with the vesicles, which carry a wide menu of molecules in the body, from enzymes to peptides, fats and genetic material. But the teams are taking very different approaches to optimizing what these vesicles can do to improve health.
Time Traveler Corp., a biotech startup launched in 2024 by Rieko Akiyama to bring ideas from her father's research in tumor biology and cancer research at University of Tokyo to longevity is one of the teams focusing on this approach. Tomoatsu Hayashi, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and co-CEO, started by studying human cells to find ways to make the vesicles at scale. Smaller versions of these vesicles, called exosomes, which are made when cell membranes fold inward, and pinch off tiny bubbles, are an increasingly popular component of anti-aging beauty products in Japan and Asia, but they remain untested from a longevity perspective, and Hayashi and his team were eager to study them in a more rigorous fashion.
Akiyama gave the team what turned out to be its XPrize-leading idea. She noted that during the COVID pandemic, there were more discussions about turning away from animal-derived materials in science, which are heavily regulated to ensure safety before they develop into products used in people, to plant-based sources, including for food products like mayonnaise. “I wondered whether human-derived exosomes could also be replaced by plant-derived exosomes, which might offer advantages in terms of safety, scalability, and ethical considerations,” she says through a digital translator during a recent interview near Hayashi’s labs at the University of Tokyo. “I brought this idea to my father and asked whether plant-derived extracellular vesicles could become a new approach for promoting healthy longevity. That conversation became the starting point of our plant-derived exosome business.”
Hayashi and his team started with edible plants and algae, assuming that those would have the strongest safety profile for eventual human use, and screened more than 140 species, including 95% of those that grow in Japan. While human exosomes were widely studied, those from plants were still a mystery, and “we didn’t know if plant exosomes would have the same effect in human cells,” he says. But starting first with mice and then with human cells, they showed that in fact, plant exosomes worked in very similar ways to human-derived exosomes, proving Rieko’s initial hunch correct. And of the species, it turned out exosomes from parsley showed the strongest effects.
In mice, the parsley-derived exosomes lowered inflammatory factors that are responsible for many aging processes in cells. Animals who were fed the exosomes in their water were able to maint...
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