Anyone with way more money than they know what to do with is trying to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page tried. Jeff Bezos tried. Billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel tried. Now it’s time to try Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom has as much money as all of the above combined.

The Saudi royal family has created a nonprofit organization called the Hevolution Foundation, which plans to spend up to $1 billion a year to support research into the biology of aging and find ways to extend people’s lives. writes the MIT Review

The amount of money the Saudis would invest would make the Gulf nation the biggest funder of researchers trying to understand the root causes of aging – and how it can be slowed with drugs.

The foundation is led by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and former PespsiCo chief scientist who was tapped to serve as CEO in 2020. “Our main goal is to extend healthy life expectancy,” Khan said in an interview. “There is no bigger medical problem on the planet than this.”

A popular idea among longevity researchers is that if you can slow the body’s aging process, you can delay the onset of many diseases. Hahn says the foundation will provide grants for scientific research into the causes of aging, as others have done, but plans to go further by supporting research in the field.

Khan says the fund is allowed to spend up to $1 billion a year indefinitely and will be able to invest in biotech companies. By comparison, the division of the US National Institute on Aging, which supports basic research on the biology of aging, spends about $325 million a year.

Hevolution has not announced which projects it will support, but people close to the group say it is looking to fund a $100 million prize for an anti-aging technology and that a preliminary agreement has been reached to fund testing of the diabetes drug metformin in several thousand people elderly.

The term “geroscience” was popularized by Felipe Sierra, former head of the Division of Aging Biology at the US National Institutes of Health, who was recently hired as Hevolution’s chief scientific officer. Sierra declined to comment, but previously called the observation “that aging is a major risk factor for all chronic diseases” as scientific.

Rapid aging

The Saudi government may be motivated in part by the belief that the diseases of the elderly pose a particular threat to the country’s future. There is evidence that people living in the Persian Gulf countries are “aging faster biologically than chronologically,” according to materials prepared by Hevolution and reviewed by the MIT Technology Review.

Mostly, the country suffers from diseases caused by overeating and insufficient exercise. Although Saudi Arabia has a relatively young population with an average age of around 31, it faces rising rates of obesity and diabetes. In a 2019 study published in the Saudi Medical Journal, Saudi health officials said the country’s prosperity had led to an “urgent need to establish prevention and control programs.”

Hevolution was created by royal decree in December 2018 and is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman. The council also includes Yevhen Lebedev, a Russian-British businessman; American billionaire Ron Burkle; and Andrew Liveris, former CEO of Dow Chemical, according to Hevolution promotional materials reviewed by MIT Technology Review.

The timing of the royal decree suggests the project may also exist to clean up the reputation of Saudi Arabia and bin Salman over the killing of a Washington Post journalist by a team the US says was acting on the prince’s orders.

Medicines for diabetes

Other drugs that may have antiaging compounds include rapamycin, an immunosuppressant that has been shown to extend the lifespan of laboratory mice and has also been tested in domestic dogs. However, no drug has yet been proven to slow aging in humans. In 2019, human trials of a version of rapamycin failed because the drug failed to improve the elderly’s resistance to respiratory infections.

No one knows if metformin will work. A long-term study of diabetics published this year found that the drug did not protect against heart problems.

But even if metformin doesn’t slow aging, the study could pave the way for other antiaging drugs to be tested in humans. Lederman says he expects the process to eventually begin if the Saudi money comes through.