In an article published on June 7, 2022, the MIT Technology Review explore Saudi Arabia’s new strategy for discover treatments to slow down aging. The oil kingdom (very controversial) is preparing to launch a major program on the subject, and to spend a billion dollars each year to try to achieve its ends.
How does Saudi Arabia want to slow aging?
Slowing down aging… This is a subject on which many billionaires have already tried their luck. We think of the founder of Google, Larry Page. Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel. It is now the turn of Saudi Arabia, which has roughly as much money as all these people put together, to try his luck. The Saudi royal family has established a non-profit organization, the Hevolution Foundation, which plans to spend up to a billion dollars a year of his wealth to support research about slowing aging and finding ways to extend human life.
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This program already makes the Gulf State the largest “sponsor” of researchers, to try to understand the underlying causes of aging and find ways to slow it down with medication. The foundation has yet to make an official announcement, but the extent of its efforts have been described at scientific meetings and already hotly debated among researchers specializing in the field of aging. They hope that this program will finally make it possible to move forward and finance major studies on the subject.
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The Saudi fund is headed by Mehmood Khan, a former chief scientist at PespsiCo. He explains that “Our goal is to extend the life span of healthy humans. There is no bigger medical problem on the planet than this.”. The specialists in slowing down aging rely heavily on delaying the onset of multiple diseases we face today, in order to prolong the healthy years. Hevolution could fund a $100 million X Prize to develop technology “aging reversal”.
An agreement has also been reached to carry out trials with metformin, a diabetes drug, on several thousand elderly people. This test, known as “TAME” (for “Targeting Aging with Metformin”), was introduced as the first major test of a drug to delay aging in humans. However, no one has ever dared to finance it. Hevolution therefore decided to finance a third of its cost. The idea is to demonstrate that this drug can delay the onset of cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2022, studies have shown that people living in the Gulf States “age faster from a biological point of view” than people living in other parts of the world. This is why the Saudi government sees aging as a specific threat to the country’s future. The country is plagued by many diseases, a certain abundance caused by too rich a diet and a lack of physical exercise. The increase in obesity and diabetes in Saudi Arabia is faster than in other countries in the world.