Longevity Prize Announces First Winners

The winners of the Hypothesis Prize have been announced as part of the Longevity Prize initiative. This is an important step for funding rejuvenation research and sets a great precedent for future longevity-focused prizes and open science.

Introducing the Longevity Prize

The Longevity Prize is a decentralized science (DeSci) initiative aiming to accelerate research efforts. This is a series of prizes to honor and accelerate progress in longevity and rejuvenation that has been brought to you by VitaDAO, Foresight Institute, Methuselah Foundation, and Lifespan.io.

The initiative will be offering a series of prizes focused on aging and longevity research, with each prize encouraging project proposals in key areas within the field. The winners of each prize group will then be awarded funds that have been collectively raised by the community supporting the Longevity Prize.

What is the Hypothesis Prize?

Over a century of all the world’s biological knowledge is available to anyone who takes the time to read the literature. There are cases in which key discoveries are made in the past but forgotten for long periods of time, only to be rediscovered. The Hypothesis Prize aims to resurface such discoveries and research areas, focusing our attention on the most promising directions.

This means that important discoveries that have been left languishing or forgotten have the opportunity to be revisited with a modern touch. It also means that this research can be expanded upon using the advances in technology that have arrived since their initial discovery.

Simply put, there could be many interesting research directions buried in the literature that the Hypothesis Prize could help unearth and get funded.

Announcing the winners of the Hypothesis Prize

Co-founder and inventor of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin was on hand to present the prizes for the top three proposals. He joined the event live from Montenegro and announced the following Hypothesis Prize winners:

$20,000 1st Prize 

Carlos Galicia – University of Southern California / Buck Institute

Summary: This article suggests that studying the process of renewal that occurs during the formation of an embryo could be a potential solution for age-related decline. To do this, researchers would need to observe how aging marks in gametes develop over the course of embryogenesis, and explore the techniques used by the embryo to rejuvenate itself. To gain a better understanding, the article proposes the use of deep phenotyping, Single Molecule Real-Time DNA sequencing, and multi-omic data analysis. It also mentions the possible clinical implications of the study’s findings.

$5,000 2nd Prize

Rakhan Aimbetov – Lead @ LABDAO, Hack-Age

Summary: Proposes to explore the as yet unknown ways in which the production of faulty proteins can disrupt the balance of proteostasis and result in age-related diseases. Proteostasis is a mechanism that regulates protein levels within cells to maintain the overall health of the body.

$2,000 3rd Prize

Shahaf Peleg – Group leader, Leibniz-Institut für Nutztierbiologie
Andrew Wojtovich – Associate Professor, University of Rochester Medical Center

Summary: This proposal presents a new technique, known as external energy replacement, to reduce the effects of aging in the eye and skin. This approach involves using a specially designed, light-sensitive proton pump called mtON to produce ATP in place of the traditional oxidative phosphorylation process.

Lifespan.io President Keith Comito had this to say about this important event:

At Lifespan.io, we are thrilled to see the enormous amount of enthusiasm for longevity and rejuvenation biotechnologies reflected in the many submissions for the Hypothesis Prize. Furthermore, we are excited by how the selected research proposals highlight potentially overlooked and novel areas with the ability to push the field forward. Congratulations to the winners!

DeSci is an alternative to traditional research funding sources

Traditional funding sources tend to suffer from a risk aversion problem, in which moonshot, high-risk projects are not funded in favor of safer but typically less ambitious ones.

The Longevity Prize (and the greater DeSci movement) represents a real opportunity for our community, rather than government, public institutions, or universities, to choose the directions of research and support the projects they want.

This prize series aims to:

Honor and accelerate progress in longevity and rejuvenation.
Encourage novel approaches to turning back the aging clock.
Differ from standard prize models by generating a flood of proposals, experiments, and collaborations on undervalued areas.
Support a growing longevity ecosystem, connecting peopel who generate proposals for progress with people who want to help execute them, and drive high-trust collaboration toward solving them.

In this way, the Longevity Prize is a great way to fast-track the kinds of rejuvenation research we want to see sooner, rather than later.

We wish to send out congratulations to the winners of the Hypothesis Prize and are looking forward to the Biomarker Assessment Prize coming next, which is focused on biomarkers of aging.