Help support the Longevity Million Molecule Challenge
Do you want to make an impact in Longevity? Help sponsor the Million Molecule Challenge!
Ora Biomedical has developed revolutionary new technology that couples robotics with artificial intelligence to automate lifespan and healthspan analyses in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. This technology allows us to quantitatively assess the impact of longevity interventions at a scale three orders of magnitude greater than what is possible today. Our goal: assess 1,000,000 longevity interventions in 5 years. That’s the Million Molecule Challenge.
By sponsoring interventions here, you will be directly contributing to discovery in longevity science. You co-own the data and you can even pick the interventions. Single interventions, combinations of interventions (we love combinations!), even entire targeted libraries. It’s all up to you. Compete against friends and colleagues to see how you stack up on the Longevity Leaderboards. And while you can always opt out, we hope you will consider allowing your sponsored intervention to be deposited into our publicly available Longevity Interventions Database that is available to the world, without restriction, catalyzing longevity science into the future.
Why do we need the Million Molecule Challenge?
Longevity intervention discovery has stagnated. The popular media and certain influencers may have misled you into believing that we are close to “solving aging”. While that’s a nice story, it’s not science. In fact, the real data suggest exactly the opposite. Certainly, great strides are being made in some areas of longevity research, but the fact is that nobody has discovered a new intervention better than caloric restriction in the past 50 years.
Nobody has found a drug or genetic therapy more effective than rapamycin in the past 15 years. Why aren’t we finding bigger and better longevity interventions every month, or at least every year? We believe that’s because most of the field is looking under the lamppost, studying what we already know. The time has come for to get out from under the longevity lamppost, let the biology tell us what is most effective, and move the field forward.
What will we get from the Million Molecule Challenge?
While we cannot predict exactly what will come out of the Million Molecule Challenge (that’s kind of the point), we can say with absolute certainty that many interventions more effective than the current gold standards (caloric restriction and rapamycin) will be identified. And by “better” we mean larger effects on lifespan and healthspan – because that’s what we care about. How can we be so certain? Because just from a small pilot screen of a few mTOR inhibitors, Ora has already identified one that works better than rapamycin. How much better can we get? It’s speculation at this point, but our preliminary data lead us to believe that combinations of 2-5 different longevity interventions have the potential to be twice to ten times as effective as the current best-in-class.
It’s also worth noting that, in addition to increasing the total knowledge in the field for longevity interventions by ~1000x, the data obtained from the Million Molecule Challenge will greatly enhance the impact of new AI technologies to predict novel targets for longevity. Current AI approaches toward longevity intervention discovery are limited by the tiny training set. Instead of feeding the neural networks metformin and rapamycin (guess what you’re going to get out), imagine if we could feed them high quality quantitative longevity and healthspan data on 1,000,000 unique interventions.
How does this work?
It’s simple. Ora Biomedical has created a set of interventions you can choose from to sponsor. Just select the interventions you wish to sponsor from the drop-down menu, or you can choose to let fate decide and use our Random Intervention Machine to select your interventions for you. The cost of sponsoring an intervention is $100. For now the set is limited to FDA-approved compounds, but additional libraries will be added, and you can even help support addition of a new library in order to make its constituents available for sponsorship. You can sponsor one or more interventions (each drug is a single intervention) in single or two-way combination. Once you complete the checkout, your sponsored intervention will go into the queue and Ora Biomedical will carry out quantitative lifespan analysis on your intervention.
Upon completion of your experiment, you will be provided secure access to both the raw data and analyzed data, which you co-own with Ora. The data is yours to do with as you please. Unless you opt out, you will also be added to the Longevity Leaderboard where you can compare your sponsored intervention against others, and your data will be deposited into the open-access Million Molecule Challenge database. Oh and, just to make things interesting, once an intervention has been sponsored, there will be an option to retest, then it will be removed from the available list of open interventions. So don’t wait to make your picks!
Our Options for Sponsorship:
For those who are interested in sponsoring larger sets of interventions or higher order combinations (3, 4, 5 drugs at a time) please use the Custom Combinatorial Intervention page and we will work with you to create your custom experiment.
Longevity needs you!
All of us at Ora believe passionately that the field needs this sort of Pragmatic Moonshot to move beyond the status quo. Together the longevity community can make the Million Molecule Challenge into the largest and most impactful community science project in the world.
Now partnering with Lifespan.io as the fiscal sponsor of the Million Molecule Challenge
Ora Biomedical is excited to partner with Lifespan.io to allow sponsorships and tax-deductible donations to be made on behalf of the Million Molecule Challenge via their non-profit organization. Sponsorships made via the Lifespan.io web-page go directly towards funding the MMC research and are also tax-deductible.
Lifespan.io is a leading nonprofit advocacy foundation and online platform committed to advancing the science of aging and promoting healthy human lifespan. By supporting groundbreaking research projects, disseminating educational resources, and raising public awareness about the importance of longevity, Lifespan.io aims to accelerate the development of therapies that can improve the quality of life for people worldwide. With a focus on collaboration and innovation, Lifespan.io is driving the conversation on aging research and transforming the way we approach health and wellness throughout our lives. For more information, please visit Lifespan.io.
To view the Terms and Conditions for being a sponsor of the Million Molecule Challenge , please click here.