Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion into anti-ageing

Saudi Arabia has committed to investing $1 billion a year into anti-ageing research by creating a non-profit dedicated to the biology of extending the vitality span of healthy humans.

The Saudi royal family founded a non-profit called the Hevolution Foundation that will invest into research focused on ageing and finding ways to expand the"health span", or the number of healthy and active years in a person's life, according to the MIT Technology Review.

Anti-ageing researchers hope that Saudi investment will lead to mass research projects into therapies, despite no official project being announced yet.

“Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan,” Mehmood Khan, a former endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who was recruited to serve as the foundation's CEO in 2020, said in an interview. 

"There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one.”

If Riyadh commits to its spending, Saudi Arabia could be the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of ageing—and its reversal with drugs.

“We need to translate that biology to progress towards human clinical research. Ultimately, it won’t make a difference until something appears in the market that actually benefits patients,” Khan added.