Methuselah Mouse Prize

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The Methuselah Mouse Prize or M Prize is a growing $3.3 million prize started in 2003 to accelerate research into slowing and eventually reversing cellular aging and breakdown in humans. The Methuselah Foundation awards prizes to researchers who extend the lifespan of a mouse to unprecedented lengths. The prize is named after Methuselah, a patriarch in the Bible said to have reached 969 years of age.

Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey is co-founder (with David Gobel) and chief scientist of the project. The prize has been covered in many news sources, including the BBC, the New York Times, and Fortune Magazine, and doubled from $1.5 million USD in August 2005 to $3 million in November 2005.

The prize is modelled after the Ansari X Prize, which accelerated efforts to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space, using money that is orders of magnitude less than comparable NASA projects.

1 Prize structure and current record holders
2 Goals and expectations
3 See also
4 External links

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Prize structure and current record holders

The Foundation currently awards two prizes: a longevity prize for extending total lifespan, and a rejuvenation prize focusing on intervention begun at older age. The Foundation collects donations in order to increase the size of the prizes. Whenever a record is broken, the researcher receives an amount based on the then current size of the prize fund and the percentage they exceeded the previous record.

The longevity prize allows any type of intervention, including breeding and genetic engineering. Only a single mouse has to be presented. As of 2005, the record holder was a mouse whose growth hormone receptor had been genetically knocked out; it lived for 1819 days (almost 5 years).

The rejuvenation prize deals with peer-reviewed studies involving at least 40 animals, 20 treated and 20 control. Treatment may begin only at mid-life, and the average lifespan of the 10% longest living treated animals is used for the record. As of 2005, this record stood at 1356 days (about 3.7 years); the treatment was calorie restriction.

Until November 2004, the Foundation ran a Reversal Prize instead of the rejuvenation prize, with the following rules: the treatment of the mouse could be started at any age, and days before treatment had started were counted double. The winner was a mouse that did not receive any dietary or pharmacological treatment at all, just an enriched environment. The mouse lived for 1551 days (about 4.2 years).

For comparison: the mouse strain most often used for studies of lifespan, called "C57Bl/6", has a normal life-span of about 3 years, while mice whose grandparents have been caught in the wild are unharmed by inbreeding and live nearly 4 years on average.[1]

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Goals and expectations

From his biogerontology work, De Grey believes there are seven root causes of cellular aging, or as he puts it, "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us,"[2] all of which are reversible. Among others, they include cell atrophy, cell death, and unwanted mutations.

De Grey stated in March 2005 "if we are to bring about real regenerative therapies that will benefit not just future generations, but those of us who are alive today, we must encourage scientists to work on the problem of aging." William Haseltine, the biotech pioneer of Human Genome Sciences said in a statement in March 2005 "there’s nothing to compare with this effort, and it has already contributed significantly to the awareness that regenerative medicine is a near term reality, not an if."

The foundation believes if slowing or reversing of cellular aging can be exhibited in mice, an enormous amount of funding would be made available for such research in humans, potentially including a massive government project similar to the Human Genome Project or by private for-profit companies.

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