Methuselah Mouse Prize

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The official Mprize logo

The Methuselah Mouse Prize or Mprize is a growing^[1] $4 million prize started in 2003 to accelerate research into slowing and eventually reversing cellular aging and breakdown in humans. It is governed by The Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) volunteer organization whose other interests beside the Mprize include PR work for the acceptance of and interest in scientific anti-aging research and SENS-based research programs, all of which the foundation hopes will lead to a proposed Institute of Biomedical Gerontology.^[2]^[3]

The Mprize follows in the spirit of the Ansari X Prize, which accelerated efforts to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space, using money that is orders of magnitude less than comparable NASA projects.^[2]

The Methuselah Foundation awards prizes to researchers who extend the lifespan of a mouse to unprecedented lengths. The prize is named after Methuselah, a patriarch in the Bible said to have reached 969 years of age. Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist at the University of Cambridge, is the chief scientist, and co-founder of the project alongside David Gobel. The prize has been covered in many news sources, including the BBC^[4]^[5], The New York Times^{[citation needed]}, and Fortune magazine^[6]. It doubled from US$1.5 million in August 2005 to $3 million in November 2005.

A notable donation was made on September 18, 2006 when PayPal founder Peter Thiel pledged $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation's research programs.^[7] Regarding his donation, Thiel said:

Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I’m backing Dr. de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones.

As of December 11, 2006 the prize has broken through the 4 million USD barrier.^[8]

1 Prize structure and current record holders
2 The science behind
3 Goals and expectations
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Prize structure and current record holders

The Foundation currently awards the following two prizes:

A longevity prize for extending total lifespan
A rejuvenation prize focusing on intervention begun at older age

The Foundation collects donations in order to increase the size of the prizes. Whenever a record is broken, the researcher receives an amount based on the then current size of the prize fund and the percentage by which they exceeded the previous record.^[9]

The longevity prize allows any type of intervention, including breeding and genetic engineering. Only a single mouse has to be presented. As of 2005, the record holder was a mouse whose growth hormone receptor had been genetically knocked out; it lived for 1819 days (almost 5 years).^[10] The rejuvenation prize deals with peer-reviewed studies involving at least 40 animals, 20 treated and 20 control. Treatment may begin only at mid-life, and the average lifespan of the 10% longest living treated animals is used for the record. As of 2005, this record stood at 1356 days (about 3.7 years); the treatment was calorie restriction.^[10]

Until November 2004, the Foundation ran a Reversal Prize instead of the rejuvenation prize, with the following rules: the treatment of the mouse could be started at any age, and days before treatment had started were counted double. The winner was a mouse that did not receive any dietary or pharmacological treatment at all, just an enriched environment. The mouse lived for 1551 days (about 4.2 years).^[11]

The mouse strain most often used for studies of lifespan, called C57BL/6, has a normal lifespan of about 3 years, while mice whose grandparents have been caught in the wild are unharmed by inbreeding and live nearly 4 years on average.^[10]^[12]

[edit] The science behind

From his biogerontology work, de Grey believes there to be seven root causes of cellular aging, or as he puts it, "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us,"^[13] all of which are reversible. They are:

Cell loss and cell atrophy
Nuclear [epi]mutations
Mitochondrial mutations
Death-resistant cells
Extracellular crosslinks
Extracellular junk
Intracellular junk

For more in-depth info on these and the proposed reversions and obviations regarding these, see SENS: The "seven deadly things" and why there are only seven.

[edit] Goals and expectations

The foundation believes that if slowing or reversing of cellular aging can be exhibited in mice, an enormous amount of funding would be made available for such research in humans, potentially including a massive government project similar to the Human Genome Project or by private for-profit companies.^[2]^[14]