Hevolution to Spend $1 billion on Healthspan Research

Hevolution Foundation has announced two grant funding initiatives with the American Federation for Aging Research. Hevolution is a non-profit dedicated to research into longevity and increasing the human lifespan. The CEO of Hevolution Foundation, Mehmood Khan, spoke of extending humanity’s average healthy lifespan, or healthspan.

Khan noted that promising life-extension technologies are likely only available to a few wealthy people. Khan rejected solutions that cannot be democratized, saying, “We need to understand what’s the line of sight to get this into the marketplace – into the hands of clinicians, and into the hands of everyone that can benefit from it. And when I say marketplace, I mean the academic environment, the non-profit environment, and the for-profit environment.”

Hevolution has several goals to help bridge the funding gap in the longevity field. Currently, much of the research in its field receives funding from multiple sources across multiple agencies. One institute might fund and research the biological underpinnings of new advancements, but another organization might be responsible for conducting clinical trials. Segregating the research and funding across multiple entities not only slows down the pace of research but can introduce competing interests rather than a collaborative effort.

When founding Hevolution, Khan envisioned both long and short-term investments to better incorporate technologies that take longer to mature. A for-profit organization would have been accountable to investors rather than scientific advancement, and long-term speculative research would have been difficult to fund when other projects were market-ready. For this reason, Khan founded Hevolution as a non-profit.

Hevolution currently has $1 billion in capital ready to invest in longevity technology. Khan indicated that the budget will be split between research funding and venture capital, although he is unsure how much of the budget will go to each.