New XPRIZE offers $101 million for longevity therapy

What's the news: You can now win $101 million if you come up with a successful longevity therapy.

Why should we believe it: This news was announced yesterday by XPRIZE, the foundation started by Elon Musk and Dr. Peter Diamandis, whom I profiled before in The Longevity Newsletter.

XPRIZE is a non-profit that aims to incentivize development of beneficial technologies. It was started in 1994. Previously, they've funded prizes for spaceflight, oil cleanup, and medical diagnosis.

This new competition is the biggest XPRIZE to date. The massive funding comes from Hevolution Foundation, a longevity organization recently started and funded by members of Saudi Arabia's royal family.

How it will work: The competition will include hundreds of teams, who will compete for the next seven years. The $101 million will be awarded to the first team that creates a therapy that produces rejuvenation of 20 years or more.

Smaller prizes (as in $61 million) will be paid out if the therapy produces rejuvenation of only of 10 years. There will also be check-in periods every so often, and significant funds will be doled out along the way to competing teams that show promise.

Why this is a big deal: A longevity therapy that reverses age by 20 years will be worth orders of magnitude more than $101 million. The real value of this XPRIZE is that it will draw public attention and interest, dramatize the possibilities of longevity research, and draw additional funding and research into the field.