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.

Why Mice?

Because of the mouse's availability, size, low cost, ease of handling, and strong genetic similarity to humans, there is no other experimental animal that offers such a wide variety of uses to science and medicine. 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. To this point, mice have been the mainstay of laboratory research on human illness, and they will continue to be essential players in future studies.

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 David Sinclair

My work focuses on preventing and treating major diseases by manipulating genes that control how fast we age. Ignoring the conventional wisdom that the aging process is too complex to find drugs that could slow it, we are working to uncover single genes that could dramatically extend the lifespan of laboratory organisms such as yeast, worms, flies and mice.

Calorie Restriction (CR) is currently the only treatment that is proven to prevent all diseases of aging including cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes and neurodegeneration. Recent studies in our lab and others indicate that the health benefits of CR are mediated by the Sirtuins, a recently discovered family of seven enzymes that control functions including metabolism, cell survival, and organ degeneration.