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Formation | 2000; 24 years ago, as the Performance Prize Society |
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Founders | David Gobel (co-founders Aubrey de Grey and Dane Gobel) |
Type | 501(c)(3) |
Focus | |
Location | |
Area served | Global |
Method |
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CEO | David Gobel |
Website | www |
The Methuselah Foundation is an American-based global non-profit organization based in Springfield, Virginia, with a declared mission to "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. [1] The organization was originally incorporated by David Gobel in 2001 as the Performance Prize Society, a name inspired by the British government’s Longitude Act, which offered monetary rewards for anyone who could devise a portable, practical solution for determining a ship's longitude.
In 2003, David Gobel, Aubrey de Grey, [2] and Dane Gobel rebranded the organization Methuselah Foundation, named after Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah in the Hebrew Bible, whose lifespan was recorded as 969 years.
The new name was introduced at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association, [3] where they awarded the first Methuselah Mouse Prize to Andrej Bartke for his work on mice that lived the equivalent of 180 human years. [4]
The Foundation's work includes:
Throughout its history, the Foundation has helped to reshape the perception of longevity research with the public and the scientific community. When it was launched, the field of longevity science was largely thought to be a playground for eccentrics. [9] Today, anti-aging or longevity research exists in the scientific mainstream and represents a $7 trillion marketplace. [10]
All of the Foundation's grants, investments, prizes and policy decisions follow seven strategies: [11]
The Methuselah Funds (M Fund) was created in 2017 as an LLC subsidiary of the Methuselah Foundation to incubate and invest in early-stage companies. [5]
The entity operates as the mechanism through which the Foundation turns its vision into reality by identifying young companies whose research promises to transform the human lifespan, providing them with seed funds to underwrite their work and supporting them with ongoing business counsel. In this way, M Fund operates much like a business incubator to help young startups focus and build, and a business accelerator to help more mature organizations develop or acquire the resources needed to sustain their growth.
Strategic counsel is typically provided by Foundation Founder and M Fund CEO David Gobel and M Fund Co-Founder and Managing Director Sergio Ruiz.
Like traditional venture funds, the M Fund aims to maximize the business success of a portfolio company inline with strategic liquidity events. However, unlike those organizations, it is primarily focused on maximizing what it calls "return on mission", which it defines as extending the healthy human lifespan. As such, the M Fund strives to support real-world products and therapies that can help any patient come to market. Gobel and Ruiz have led investments in:
In 2016, NASA in partnership with the New Organ Alliance announced the Vascular Tissue Challenge. [24] [25] Creating a sufficient blood vessel system – vasculature – is often seen by biomedical researchers as a primary impediment in engineering thick tissues. The Vascular Tissue Challenge offers a $500,000 prize "to be divided among the first three teams that successfully create thick, metabolically-functional human vascularized organ tissue in a controlled laboratory environment." Two teams were awarded prizes for their breakthrough work in 2021. [26]
In November 2016, in conjunction with the Vascular Tissue Challenge, the New Organ Alliance hosted at the NASA Research Park the Vascular Tissue Challenge Roadmapping Workshop, with funding from the NSF.
In 2021, Methuselah announced that a second collaboration with NASA, the Deep Space Food Challenge, awarded $25,000 prizes to each of the 18 U.S. teams that designed a novel food production technology concept that maximizes safe, nutritious and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions. [27] The competition has entered a second round, in which teams must actually build their technology. [28] [29]
The Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, whose mission is to create social and political action around the issue of combating age-related chronic conditions and increasing our number of healthy, disease-free years. [30] The organization seeks to build policies that encourage economic and scientific support for more longevity solutions, such as bioengineered patient trials and dramatically improved biomedical research models that use engineered human tissue.
Methuselah Foundation contributed $1 million to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to fund development. Aging is a leading risk factor for most common neurodegenerative diseases, including strokes, brain tumors, aneurysms, cognitive impairments and dementias. [31]
In 2013, Methuselah Foundation began a partnership with Organovo to fund the use of their 3D bioprinters at academic research centers for biomedical research. [32] Under the grant program, the foundation committed "at least $500,000 in direct funding for research projects across several institutions." [33] The first recipients were Yale School of Medicine, [34] UCSF School of Medicine, [35] and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. [36]
The Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize) was created to increase scientific and public interest in longevity research by awarding two cash prizes: "one to the research team that broke the world record for the oldest-ever mouse; and one to the team that developed the most successful late-onset rejuvenation strategy." The Mprize was announced publicly in 2003 by David Gobel and Aubrey de Grey at the American Aging Association. The prize for longevity was first won by a research team led by Andrzej Bartke of Southern Illinois University. The prize for rejuvenation first went to Stephen Spindler of the University of California, Riverside. Additionally, in 2009, the first Mprize Lifespan Achievement Award went to Z. Dave Sharp of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio for extending the lifespan of already aged mice using the pharmaceutical rapamycin. In May 2014, at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association, Methuselah Foundation awarded a $10,000 Mprize to Huber Warner for his founding of the National Institute on Aging's Interventions Testing Program.
In 2015, with funding from the Methuselah Foundation and Life Extension Foundation, the bowhead whale genome was sequenced by João Pedro de Magalhães and his team at the University of Liverpool. [37] The bowhead whale is possibly the longest-lived mammal, capable of living over 200 years. [38] The genome project was undertaken to learn more about the mammal's mechanisms for longevity and resistance to age-related diseases, which are unknown. [38] An assembly of the bowhead whale genome has been made available online to promote further research. [39]
The Methuselah Foundation fiscally sponsors the New Organ Alliance, an initiative aimed at raising awareness and facilitating research to help alleviate organ donation shortages. [40] [41] In 2013, the foundation announced the New Organ Liver Prize, a $1,000,000 award to the first team that can create a bioengineered or regenerative liver therapy for a "large mammal, enabling the host to recover in the absence of native liver function and survive three months with a normal lifestyle." [42] [43]
The initiative is held in partnership with the Organ Preservation Alliance. New Organ Alliance worked out a technology roadmap report for organ banking and bioengineering solutions to help address organ shortages. [44] The roadmap was developed through a workshop in May 2015 in Washington, D.C., along with a subsequent roundtable held by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It is funded from the National Science Foundation [45] and Methuselah Foundation. Two follow-up perspectives were published, "The Promise of Organ and Tissue Preservation to Transform Medicine" [46] and "Bioengineering Priorities on a Path to Ending Organ Shortage". [47]
In 2016, NASA in partnership with the New Organ Alliance announced the Vascular Tissue Challenge. [24] [25] Creating a sufficient blood vessel system – vasculature – is often seen by biomedical researchers as a primary impediment in engineering thick tissues. [48] [49] The Vascular Tissue Challenge offers a $500,000 prize "to be divided among the first three teams that successfully create thick, metabolically-functional human vascularized organ tissue in a controlled laboratory environment." [50]
In November 2016, in conjunction with the Vascular Tissue Challenge, the New Organ Alliance hosted at the NASA Research Park the Vascular Tissue Challenge Roadmapping Workshop, with funding from the NSF. [51] [52]
In 2013, Methuselah began fiscally sponsoring and collaborating with the Organ Preservation Alliance, an initiative coordinating research and stakeholders for the preservation of tissues and organs. [2] [53] [54] [55] The organization's activities have included:
The Organ Preservation Alliance, an initiative coordinating research and stakeholders focused on the preservation of tissues and organs. In 2015, OPA became an independent Tax exempt non-profit organization.
In 2006, Methuselah contributed capital and fiscal sponsorship to launch the Supercentenarian Research Foundation (SRF). [2] SRF was formed to study why supercentenarians, people over 110 years of age, live longer than most, and why they die. [63] Eight autopsies of supercentenarians were conducted by SRF, with six indicating senile cardiac transthyretin amyloidosis at the time of death. With this disease, a defective protein "amasses in and clogs blood vessels, forcing the heart to work harder and eventually fail." [64] [65]
From 2003 to 2009, [2] Methuselah Foundation served as the backbone organization for the strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS) program, a long-term research framework developed by Aubrey de Grey. [66] The SENS program aims to prevent or reverse seven forms of molecular or cellular damage associated with aging. [67]
During that time, de Grey and David Gobel established SENS-related research programs on human bioremedial biology – "getting the crud out" in Methuselah's parlance [68] – at Rice University and Arizona State University. [6] The programs were the first use of environmental remediation principles directed at reversing "pollution" in human cells. [69] Additionally, Methuselah sponsored a series of SENS-focused roundtables and conferences, [70] and funded the writing of Ending Aging , co-authored by de Grey and Michael Rae.
Under de Grey's continued leadership, SENS spun out from Methuselah as the SENS Research Foundation in 2009. [2]
Due to the close relationship between the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation and their common activities, there are sometimes misunderstandings about their budgets, directions, and amounts of donations which can be distributed between these organizations for various purposes.
In 2004, the Methuselah Foundation began a donor initiative called "The Methuselah 300" ("The 300"), [71] a community of philanthropic donors pledging $25,000 over 25 years, at a minimum of $1,000 annually, toward the organization. The initiative was named after the 300 Spartans who held the pass at Thermopylae in 480 BC during the Greco-Persian War. In addition, in 2015, the foundation began memorializing The 300 donors with a monument [72] at St. Thomas Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
On September 16, 2006, Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of the online payments system PayPal, announced that he was pledging $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS programs "to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging". [73]
In 2007, Justin Bonomo, a professional poker player, pledged 5% of his tournament winnings to SENS research. [74] [75]
In January 2018, the anonymous principal of the Pineapple Fund donated $1 million to the Methuselah Foundation, [76] in addition to $2 million donated to SENS Research Foundation. [77]
On May 12, 2021, Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of ethereum and transhumanist, made a series of donations to the foundation. The three transfers, made minutes apart, contained 432 trillion Dogelon Mars, worth about $336 million at the time of transfer, [78] and two transfers of 1000 Ether in total, worth more than $2 million. [79]
Maximum life span is a measure of the maximum amount of time one or more members of a population have been observed to survive between birth and death. The term can also denote an estimate of the maximum amount of time that a member of a given species could survive between birth and death, provided circumstances that are optimal to that member's longevity.
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). De Grey is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.
Strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS) is a range of proposed regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development, for the periodic repair of all age-related damage to human tissue. These therapies have the ultimate aim of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in patients and postponing age-associated disease. SENS was first defined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Many mainstream scientists believe that it is a fringe theory. De Grey later highlighted similarities and differences of SENS to subsequent categorization systems of the biology of aging, such as the highly influential Hallmarks of Aging published in 2013.
Organ printing utilizes techniques similar to conventional 3D printing where a computer model is fed into a printer that lays down successive layers of plastics or wax until a 3D object is produced. In the case of organ printing, the material being used by the printer is a biocompatible plastic. The biocompatible plastic forms a scaffold that acts as the skeleton for the organ that is being printed. As the plastic is being laid down, it is also seeded with human cells from the patient's organ that is being printed for. After printing, the organ is transferred to an incubation chamber to give the cells time to grow. After a sufficient amount of time, the organ is implanted into the patient.
Gregory Stock is an American biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.
Following is a list of topics related to life extension:
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to life extension:
Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".
David Gobel is an American philanthropist, entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist. He is co-founder and CEO of the Methuselah Foundation, CEO of the Methuselah Fund, and one of the first to publicly advance the idea of longevity escape velocity, even before this term was formulated.
The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that does research programs and public relations work for the application of regenerative medicine to aging. It was founded in 2009, located in Mountain View, California, US. The organization publishes its reports annually.
Three dimensional (3D) bioprinting is the use of 3D printing–like techniques to combine cells, growth factors, bio-inks, and biomaterials to fabricate functional structures that were traditionally used for tissue engineering applications but in recent times have seen increased interest in other applications such as biosensing, and environmental remediation. Generally, 3D bioprinting uses a layer-by-layer method to deposit materials known as bio-inks to create tissue-like structures that are later used in various medical and tissue engineering fields. 3D bioprinting covers a broad range of bioprinting techniques and biomaterials. Currently, bioprinting can be used to print tissue and organ models to help research drugs and potential treatments. Nonetheless, translation of bioprinted living cellular constructs into clinical application is met with several issues due to the complexity and cell number necessary to create functional organs. However, innovations span from bioprinting of extracellular matrix to mixing cells with hydrogels deposited layer by layer to produce the desired tissue. In addition, 3D bioprinting has begun to incorporate the printing of scaffolds which can be used to regenerate joints and ligaments. Apart from these, 3D bioprinting has recently been used in environmental remediation applications, including the fabrication of functional biofilms that host functional microorganisms that can facilitate pollutant removal.
TheThiel Foundation is an American private foundation created and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook.
Maria Entraigues-Abramson is an Argentine-American singer, composer, and actress, and is the Director of Development for the SENS Research Foundation.
Organovo Holdings, Inc. is an early-stage medical laboratory and research company which designs and develops functional, three dimensional human tissue for medical research and therapeutic applications. Organovo was established in 2007 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. The company uses its internally developed NovoGen MMX Bioprinter for 3D bioprinting.
Regeneration in humans is the regrowth of lost tissues or organs in response to injury. This is in contrast to wound healing, or partial regeneration, which involves closing up the injury site with some gradation of scar tissue. Some tissues such as skin, the vas deferens, and large organs including the liver can regrow quite readily, while others have been thought to have little or no capacity for regeneration following an injury.
Axel Haverich is a German cardiac surgeon.
The Pineapple Fund was a philanthropic project by an anonymous individual which gave away 5,057 bitcoins to 60 charities. The amount was valued at $86 million in December 2017. Some of the themes supported were medical research, environmental conservation, human rights and psychedelic therapy.
Microgravity bioprinting is the utilization of 3D bioprinting techniques under microgravity conditions to fabricate highly complex, functional tissue and organ structures. The zero gravity environment circumvents some of the current limitations of bioprinting on Earth including magnetic field disruption and biostructure retention during the printing process. Microgravity bioprinting is one of the initial steps to advancing in space exploration and colonization while furthering the possibilities of regenerative medicine.
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University focused on bridging the gap between academia and industry by drawing inspiration from nature's design principles to solve challenges in health care and the environment. It is focused on the field of biologically inspired engineering to be distinct from bioengineering and biomedical engineering. The institute also has a focus on applications, intellectual property generation, and commercialization.
Kelly Stevens is an American bioengineer and associate professor at the University of Washington. Her research considers the study and development of human platforms to understand and treat disease. She was named a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Fellow in 2022.