Overview

What is the Mprize?

The Mprize competition is an exciting and viable mid-term strategy to deliver on the Methuselah Foundation's mission of extending healthy human life. It directly accelerates the development of revolutionary new life extension therapies by awarding two cash prizes: one to the research team that breaks the world record for the oldest-ever mouse; and one to the team that develops the most successful late-onset rejuvenation. Previous winners have already proven that healthy life can be extended; each new winner pushes the outer limits of healthy life back even further...and each new winner takes us even further.

Why Prizes?

A well-designed prize is the ONLY method that has shown to be 100% successful in turning the impossible into a near-term reality. Prizes make this kind of ground-breaking change achievable by:

Encouraging new levels of excellence and specific innovations in uncharted territory
Expanding society's perceptions of what is possible
Attracting high levels of investments, donations, and resources
Dramatically increasing the pool of potential solvers by marshalling the most diverse possible group of talent, approaches, and techniques

By throwing out all previous assumptions about aging and offering scientists and researchers a huge (and ever-increasing!) cash prize incentive, the Mprize is guaranteed to create revolutionary solutions...quite possibly within our lifetimes.

A History of Science Prizes

Why Mice?

Mice are genetically similar to humans. They are small and inexpensive to maintain so studying large quantities is feasible. Their short lifespan, about three years, makes it possible to see if interventions result in longer, healthier lives – all in time to be of benefit to our own lives.

Mice are widely considered to be the prime model of inherited human disease and studies have shown that mice share 99% of their genes with humans. The similarities between sections of human and mouse DNA allow researchers working with mouse genes to make incredibly accurate predictions about the location and function of their human counterparts. Mice have been the mainstay of laboratory research on human illness and longevity.

The species Mus musculus is used in the laboratory for experimental work, including the biology of aging. Their long history of captivity has resulted in strong selection for rapid growth and breeding and has resulted in a wide variation in lifespan between different (inbred) laboratory strains. Most useful studies of lifespan are done on strains with a relatively long lifespan. The one most often used is "C57Bl/6", which normally lives about three years without any life-extending intervention.

What You Can Do

What do the end of famine, the discovery of longitude, and private space travel have in common? Each of these world-changing innovations was created by an inventor seeking to win a prize. The Mprize is a multi-million dollar prize to end the diseases of aging. Right now, brilliant minds all around the world are competing for this prize. Your support will help them get there faster.

Competitor Stephen Spindler

The rate of animal aging is strongly influenced by diet. The more calories consumed, the faster it ages. Well-fed animals not only age faster, they have higher mortality from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. And the reverse is true, the fewer calories eaten (provided malnutrition is avoided) the slower an animal ages, the lower the death rate from cancer, and the lower the rate of heart disease and diabetes. CR has been viewed as less effective in older animals and as acting incrementally to slow or prevent age-related changes in gene expression. However, we found that mice who begin CR in late middle-age reap its benefits almost immediately.

We also have performed other genome-wide gene-expression studies in mice with disrupted growth hormone-insulin-like growth factor-1 signaling (DF) that were either CR or given free access to food. Others have shown that either DF or CR alone can extend lifespan, and that together they act additively to extend the lifespan of mice even more. We found that CR and DF additively affected the expression of a group of genes. Individually and together, DF and CR independently affected the expression of other groups of genes. These results indicate that DF and CR affect overlapping sets of genes, and additively affect a subset of genes associated with enhanced longevity. These results provide a focused group of new genes which are important in regulating the lifespan of mammals, and which may be 'drugable targets' for anti-aging therapeutics.