Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation commits millions to transform healthspan research

Saudi Arabia’s billion-dollar-a-year healthspan initiative, the Hevolution Foundation, has unveiled a sweeping portfolio of grants and investments spanning three continents to fuel transformative breakthroughs in healthspan - or healthy aging - science.

This week the Kingdom is hosting more than 3,000 attendees for its second-ever Global Healthspan Summit - designed to foster a healthier aging future – and is pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to accelerate discoveries toward therapeutic interventions specifically targeting healthspan.

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In his opening address, Dr. Mehmood Khan, CEO of the Hevolution Foundation – overseen by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, thanked the Crown Prince for his “unwavering support” to the field.

He said, “Just over a year ago, we met right here in this building, in this location, and launched the first-ever Global Healthspan Summit to be held in the world. Today, we are the second largest funder of geroscience and aging biology on the planet.”

In the last 20 months, the Foundation has launched more than $400 million in research grants. More than 200 global laboratories and 250 scientists worldwide have benefited, including 245 scientists in Saudi Arabia.

“But that is not enough,” said Dr. Khan. “Today, we have one billion people on the planet that are over the age of 60. Today, we have more people over the age of 60 than there are under the age of five. We have more retirees than children.”

“If you project that to the future we will have a huge mismatch. If you project that to the next 10, 20, 30 years, we will see a huge mismatch between those who can contribute actively and are healthy versus those who are recipients. That is the future we are looking at. Our goal is to change that future.”

While human lifespans have increased dramatically in recent decades, longevity alone doesn’t guarantee a healthier or better quality of life.

The conference heard that there are more than one billion people over the age of 60 in the world today; this will double to two billion by 2050, and one in five people will be over 60 by 2050.

And this transcends boundaries, with all regions getting older.

Today, Japan is one of the oldest countries, with a median age of 48; this is expected to rise to 54 by 2050.

China, Cuba, Italy, Spain, and South Korea are among the countries expected to hit a median age over 50 by 2050.

Even relatively young countries are aging rapidly.

In 1990, the median age in Saudi Arabia was 18 years; today it is around 30 years and by 2050 it is estimated to be almost 40 years.

The Hevolution Foundation – a global fund that aims to find and invest in innovative ways to “decelerate” the aging process and extend the number of years people live in good health – is heavily invested in academic research and biotech startups to promote longevity by slowing aging and combating age-related diseases.

A slew of grants has been announced by the Foundation to accelerate longevity research.

The foundation’s largest single commitment of $230 million targets pre-clinical projects in aging biology and translational geroscience through its Geroscience Research Opportunities Program.

The foundation is making significant inroads into American academia, forming major partnerships with prestigious institutions. Northwestern University has secured $32.4 million for proteostasis research, while the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received $20 million for senescence studies under Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo.

The Buck Institute landed $21 million for therapeutic aging interventions.

Perhaps most ambitious is the foundation’s $40 million commitment to the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, which challenges teams to reverse aging markers in elderly participants.

On the home front, Hevolution is working to establish Saudi Arabia as a hub for aging research, allocating millions of dollars across two programs to develop local talent and research capacity.

That includes a $5.2 million two-year grant program to create the first cohort of aging researchers in Saudi Arabia, funding 11 grantees from King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and other prestigious institutions to explore areas such as the microbiome, aging biomarkers, and senescence. That is in addition to a $1.9 million program which aims to develop and introduce new Saudi scientists to the field of aging research by facilitating their development as creative and innovative future scholars in the field.

The foundation’s international scope extends to Latin America with a $5 million initiative, while also providing over $27 million to support promising research projects that were highly rated but unfunded by the US National Institute on Aging.

The foundation is simultaneously building its commercial portfolio, investing in biotechnology companies targeting key aging mechanisms. These investments include support for Aeovian Pharmaceuticals’ mTOR inhibitor development, Rubedo Life’s AI-driven senescence research, and Vandria SA’s work on mitophagy inducers, signaling a comprehensive approach to transforming aging research from laboratory to marketplace.

Understanding biological aging

Princess Dr. Haya Bint Khaled Bin Bandar Al Saud, also of the Hevolution Foundation, highlighted critical gaps in health span science and outlined ambitious plans to transform aging research. She emphasized the organization’s focus on extending not just lifespan, but quality of life through health span improvements.

“We at the Hevolution Foundation are really focusing on changing the views of multiple people across the globe, that the importance is not only in extending lifespan, it’s how to extend the health span,” Princess Dr. Haya stated during a panel discussion on health span science.

The princess identified major gaps in current geroscience research. “One is understanding the underlying biology of aging,” she explained. “We have identified multiple pathways. However, there is much more that needs to be done.” She noted that another challenge involves developing new tools and technologies, including AI and computational biology, to understand the complexity of aging processes.

Another critical gap, according to Dr. Haya, is the translation of research from animal models to humans. “There are promising results that are superb, but today we need to validate it in humans,” she emphasized. Perhaps most significantly, she pointed to a broader systemic issue: “One of the biggest gaps is underfunded aging... geroscience is underfunded today.”

As Al Arabiya English previously reported, the Saudi Crown Prince issued a royal decree five years ago to establish the Kingdom’s Hevolution Foundation. He pledged a vast financial investment – over one billion dollars per year – into research that would extend the healthy human lifespan. The not-for-profit foundation aims to democratize access to anti-aging science to benefit all of humanity.

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