The Saudi Royal family has launched a non-profit organization with a one-billion-dollar annual budget to fund basic research into “slowing aging” and extending the “period of health” in people.
The charity foundation, Hevolution, seeks to support basic research on the biology of aging and find ways to extend the number of years people live in good health.
The sum could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging—and how it might be slowed down with drugs.
The organization has yet to make a formal announcement, but the extent of its work has been laid out at scientific events, and it’s a hot issue among aging researchers hoping to secure massive human studies of promising anti-aging medications.
The fund is managed by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the onetime chief scientist at PepsiCo, who was recruited to the CEO job in 2020.
“Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan,” Khan said in an interview. “There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one.”
Khan says the fund is going to give grants for basic scientific research on what causes aging, just as others have done, but it also plans to go a step further by supporting drug studies, including trials of “treatments that are patent expired or never got commercialized.”
Khan says the fund is authorized to spend up to $1 billion per year indefinitely and will be able to take financial stakes in biotech companies. By comparison, the division of the US National Institute on Aging that supports basic research on the biology of aging spends about $325 million a year.
Hevolution was chartered by royal order in December 2018, and its chairman is Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman.
