SAN DIEGO — The University of California, San Diego is now at the center of a global contest that hopes to unlock quality-of-life gains in the same way that a previous competition revolutionized commercial spaceflight.

The university announced Tuesday that its Stein Institute for Research on Aging will serve as the central laboratory and biorepository for XPRIZE Healthspan, a seven-year research challenge that will award $81 million to the team of researchers who best demonstrate “innovative therapies that restore muscle, cognitive and immune function by a minimum of 10 years (with a goal of 20), to make healthy aging possible for everyone.”

Stein will receive $10 million from the $101 million overall budget to design testing protocols, manage the project’s biorepository, analyze samples, and report the results that will ultimately decide who wins this global biotechnology race.

Healthspan, a word which emphasizes increasing quality of life over simply increasing overall lifespan, comes from the XPRIZE Foundation, the private nonprofit that gained broad exposure starting in 1996 with the Ansari XPRIZE. That contest awarded $10 million to the first organization to build a “reliable, reusable, crewed spacecraft capable of reaching 100 kilometers above Earth twice within two weeks using only private funding.”

Mojave Aerospace Ventures’ won the race in 2004 with its SpaceShipOne craft, but the victory’s effects spread far beyond a single company. XPRIZE claims credit for its contest spurring a commercial space industry now valued at nearly $500 billion, with companies such as SpaceX developing reusable rockets that have already launched thousands of satellites and are pursuing NASA-like ambitions such as colonizing the moon and Mars.

The hope is that dangling an even larger carrot — $81 million instead of $10 million — can cause the same sort of launch in the fight to slow or even reduce the effects of aging. Similar “grand challenges” are underway in climate change science, quantum computing, water scarcity and wildfire prevention.

The XPRIZE Foundation launched its Healthspan competition in 2023, accepting more than 600 applications from all comers who thought they could create a therapy, administered in one year or less, capable of delivering “more years of life with improved functional ability” to those aged 50 to 90.

On Tuesday morning, the foundation announced 20 Healthspan finalists, including 10 who will receive $1 million in additional funding, who have been exploring a range of approaches to increase functional health later in life, everything from combinations of existing drugs to a new “biologic treatment that disrupts cell damage, inflammation, and fibrosis in the brain and body,” or “extracellular vesicles” that can carry proteins, lipids and other payloads thought to be capable of cellular rejuvination.

All of the proposed methods will need to be judged on their effectiveness in order for a winner to claim the prize. Last year, XPRIZE announced a 13-member judging panel composed of industry experts drawn from industry and academia.

But this group of arbiters will need an objective set of facts to judge, and that is where UCSD comes in.

Speaking from Salt Lake City, where XPRIZE finalists were named Tuesday, neuroscientist Anthony Molina, scientific director of the Stein Institute, said that he withdrew his own XPRIZE application after it was named one of the 40 semifinalists in order to serve as the competitive effort’s testing hub.

UCSD, he noted, has been a worldwide leader in discovering and learning to confirm the presence of an ever-growing range of biomarkers — molecules such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, hormones, enzymes, DNA and RNA — shed by the cells that indicate a person’s biological age.

Observing the concentrations of these biomarkers in blood and urine samples provides evidence of how a person’s cellular processes are operating, shedding light on the condition of wear and tear, like the odometer on a car.

“At UCSD, we’re the people who have been creating these biomarkers over the years,” Molina said. “I mean, the first epigenetic clock was generated at UCSD.”

The epigenetic clock estimates a person’s biological age by detecting whether small molecules have attached to a person’s DNA, a process that changes gene activation during aging. Analyzing patterns of methylation can help determine biological age.

And this is an area that is continually advancing.

Molina and his research team recently published findings that certain “circulating non-cellular factors such as plasma proteins” can serve as biomarkers to estimate the biological age of mitochondria. A 25-protein signature can indicate how much aging has affected this cellular organ, often called the “powerhouse of the cell.”

Molina and his colleagues at Stein have been working behind the scenes to create a constellation of biomarkers that will serve as the central proof of whether or not the interventions proposed by the 20 Healthspan finalists are able to affect the aging process.

“We’ve been working on this for quite some time, because the trials will start, probably sometime in October,” Molina said.

The 10 finalist labs will send samples to UCSD for biomarker analysis, which will then have a final judgment in 2030. UCSD will also preserve all samples in a biobank, potentially enabling future scientific investigation.

Frozen samples are the true goldmine of any biological research effort, and that’s because scientists can be sure that, whatever is possible today, capabilities will be far greater in the future.

“Testing gets better and better every year; a few years ago, we were able to measure 1,000 biomarkers, and now we’re looking at 7,000,” Molina said. “The biobank aspect of this project is so important because what we’re going to be able to test in four or five years is going to grow exponentially.”

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