Saudi Arabia Commits to Invest $1 Billion a Year for Anti-Ageing Research and Finding Ways to Extend Lifespan

The royal family of Suadi Arabia has committed to investing $1 billion a year into a non-profit called Hevolution Foundation, which is dedicated to anti-ageing research and the biology of extending the lifespan of healthy humans.

The oil kingdom hopes that the anti-ageing research will develop therapies that can be mass-produced. However, there is no official project being announced yet. Former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist Mehmood Khan who now serves as the foundation's CEO, told MIT Technology Review that their primary goal is to extend the period of a healthy lifespan.

(Photo : Unsplash/Julia Koblitz)
Saudi Arabia Commits to Invest $1 Billion A Year for Anti-Aging Research and Finding Ways to Extend Lifespan

Largest Sponsor of Anti-Ageing Research

The scope of the foundation's effort has been outlined at scientific meetings. It has been the subject of excited chatter among researchers who also study ageing in hopes that it will bring about extensive human studies of possible anti-aging drugs.

Khan said that they are authorized to spend up to $1 billion per year indefinitely and will be able to take stakes from biotech companies. If they can spend it, the foundation will be touted as the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the ageing mechanism and how therapies could slow it down.

Longevity scientists have been researching the body's ageing process in hopes of understanding how to delay the onset of multiple age-related diseases and extend a person's healthy years to enjoy their life as they grow older.

The fund will give grants to scientific research on what causes ageing and studies that aim to develop anti-ageing drugs, including clinical trials of treatments that are either patent expired or never got the chance to be commercialized.

The foundation's financial stake is even bigger than the division of the US National Institute on Aging, which supports basic research on the biology of ageing that spends $325 million per year.

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Targeting Ageing with Metformin (TAME)

Although no official studies have been announced yet, Interesting Engineering reported that Hevolution is looking to fund a $100 million X Prize for age reversal technology that uses the diabetes drug metformin. It has already reached a preliminary agreement to test the drug in several thousand elderly people in a trial called Targeting Ageing with Metformin (TAME).

The clinical trial is the first major test of any drug to delay ageing in humans. Sadly, the study has languished after many years when no one is willing to fund it. Hevolution has agreed to fund one-third of its cost, as it announced a few months ago.

The TAME trial was an idea by Nir Barzilai, a researcher at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. The trial aims to prove the "geroscience hypothesis," which is the idea that some drugs may be able to delay the onset of many diseases, like cancer and Alzheimer's.