Saudi to spend $1bn a year discovering treatments to slow aging
Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it.
The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as “health span.”
The foundation hasn’t yet made a formal announcement, but the scope of its effort has been outlined at scientific meetings and is the subject of excited chatter among aging researchers, who hope it will underwrite large human studies of potential anti-aging drugs. That trial, known as “TAME” (for “Targeting Aging with Metformin”), has been touted as the first major test of any drug to postpone aging in humans, but the study has languished for years without anyone willing to pay for it.
The Saudi government may be partially motivated by the belief that diseases of aging pose a specific threat to that country’s future. Since aging itself is not easily measured, nor even considered a disease by regulators, the target of the TAME trial is instead to see if taking metformin can delay the onset of a range of age-related diseases.
