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Boston Globe

Boston scientists join $81m quest to extend human healthspan

Americans are living longer than in generations past, yet those gains have not translated to longer, healthy lives, as But an unusual competition is aiming to change that with a goal of dramatically extending the number of our healthy years — known as our healthspan. An $81 million grand prize is up for grabs to the researchers who add two decades to our healthspan by restoring lost muscle mass, cognitive ability and immune function in people ages 50 to 80. Two Massachusetts teams have made it to the competition's semi-finals, a list that includes 40 teams worldwide, with 19 based in the United States. Now comes the hard part: semifinalists must, in the next year, demonstrate they're ready to test their intervention on people. Advertisement 'There's the divide from going from the lab to testing in real life, on living, breathing people. It's not just a small bridge that has to be overcome, it's like the Grand Canyon,' said Jamie Justice, a top executive at the The hurdles in this challenge are considerable. Americans, on average, spend Advertisement The growing gap between life and health spans around the world has fueled a That interest is reflected in the sheer number of teams that entered the competition — more than 600 across 58 countries — and the diverse array of proposed interventions to reverse the ravages of aging, from methods to bolster the immune system, tamp down inflammation, fire up the body's system of breaking down and reusing old cells, and more. Winners must come up with a drug, a device, a therapy, or a combination of approaches. A team from Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of the two semifinalists from Massachusetts, aims to use a GLP-1 medication similar to wildly popular weight loss drugs such as Ozempic. A growing number of studies suggest this class of drug can improve multiple age-related conditions linked to obesity such as diabetes and heart disease, and perhaps certain cancers. 'It's been linked now to a reduced risk of Parkinson's disease and dementia, all kinds of outcomes,' said Adds Dr. Shalender Bhasin, director of the Brigham's Boston Claude Pepper Aging Research Center and the co-lead researcher: GLP-1 drugs are 'an attractive candidate because they have been used in tens of thousands of people now. So we have a good safety record.' The medications, however, have never been tested for their effect on delaying the onset of a person's first age-related disorder. Federal regulators require medications to target a specific disease to be approved, yet Advertisement Part of the XPRIZE challenge requires teams to show by using a biomarker test, such as a blood sample, that their approach actually improves muscle mass, cognitive function, and immune function, in addition to other potential improvements that may be more readily apparent. The Brigham team plans to tap 300 to 400 participants who are overweight for their trial, which will deliver a low dose of the medication. The other Massachusetts semifinalist is Stealth is proposing to use an experimental drug called Elamipretide, a molecule that targets the mitochondria. David A. Brown, the company's senior vice president and team leader for the XPRIZE challenge, said a small trial the company conducted to test the molecule's effectiveness showed it preserved a layer of the retina that's rich with mitochondria in older adults with macular degeneration, an age-related disease that affects vision. 'The fact that the decline in vision is often accompanied by mitochondrial dysfunction, the fact that we saw such encouraging signs in older individuals, just provided further fuel to our fire that this really could be something here to improve the healthspan in older individuals,' Brown said. David A. Brown, Senior Vice President of Discovery at Stealth BioTherapeutics of Needham. He leads a team of scientists that made the semi-finals in the XPRIZE Stealth BioTherapeutics Another small study that involved one injection of Elamipretide in older adults appeared to strengthen the muscles in their hands, an area that often becomes weaker with age. Advertisement 'Lots of independent investigators have studied this molecule with probably over 150 peer-reviewed publications,' Brown said. The company Each semi-finalist team receives $250,000 to help defray costs for this next round, but XPRIZE administrators acknowledge many will need to secure additional funding, which could be a problem, particularly in the US, where numerous researchers have experienced significant Semi-finalists need to demonstrate their ability to secure necessary regulatory approvals to conduct a trial, which is often time-consuming. They must also prove their ability to recruit participants. By 2026, only 10 finalists will remain, each receiving $1 million to move into full-scale human trials. In that round, the trials must include at least 100 participants for one year. XPRIZE judges will be paying close attention to whether the proposed drug or other type of intervention would be easily accessible to most people. 'The solution might be great, but maybe it's only achievable for one person, either that or it's too risky or too expensive, or any other barriers,' said Justice, the XPRIZE executive vice president. 'The judges want to make sure that any of the therapeutics to get advanced actually have a chance of making public good.' The competition is slated to conclude in 2030. But what happens if no team meets that ultimate goal? That's happened a few times in the XPRIZE'S 30-year history of challenges, including last year for a competition that aimed to ease world hunger and the food industry's strain on climate by requiring researchers to recreate fish and meat alternatives. Judges determined the closest entries hit most of the requirements, including a reasonable taste, but missed recreating an acceptable texture. No prize was awarded. Advertisement 'Because of the relationships we're building with our sponsors, we don't foresee that,' Justice said. 'But at the same time, it's not going to be a gimme. Even to get to where the judges might say this has merit, the teams really do have to have something they can demonstrate that's an innovation beyond what we have available now.' Kay Lazar can be reached at