BERKELEY, Calif. — Jamie Justice is an anti-aging researcher with a superheroic name and a suitably grand mission. A few years ago, she left her tenure-track job at Wake Forest University and teamed up with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis at XPRIZE Healthspan. XPRIZE Healthspan is a $101 million global competition aimed at identifying treatments that can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function in older adults.
“The aging-slowing market is booming, but there’s no way to know if[the treatments]will work,” Justice said on stage at Vitalist Bay, a longevity conference held here this month. XPRIZE Healthspan, of which she is executive director, was founded to fill that gap. This year, 10 of the 40 teams selected will be required to test their treatments in a year-long randomized controlled clinical trial before the grand prize winner is announced in 2030.
Wearing wide-leg jeans and a dark blazer, Justice explained to the audience the different approaches to longevity among XPRIZE competitors. Personalized medicine targeting exercise, senolytics (drugs that target damaged “zombie” cells that increase with age), and biomarkers are some of the common approaches.
As acknowledged by those involved, the field of longevity tends to attract a wide variety of people with outlandish theories. (A man in a purple cape strutted across the grounds of Vitalist Bay.) Figures like Justice, who clings to academic connections as an adjunct assistant professor of gerontology and geriatrics at Wake Forest University, occupy the more down-to-earth, science-based end of the spectrum. But she welcomes a larger-scale approach to the world of anti-aging research. “I think as scientists, we have to be very careful not to become gatekeepers,” she told STAT in an interview after her talk.
STAT spoke with Justice to learn more about XPRIZE Healthspan’s competitors, research on what people really want in retirement, and the issue of “purely fraudulent” companies that give longevity a bad name.
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