[A2k] The Mprize

[James Packard Love]

http://www.keionline.org/index.php?option=3Dcom_jd-wp&Itemid=3D39&p=3D14

Prizes | James Love
The Mprize
May 27th, 2007 by James Love

Many of us have heard about the X-Prize, but what about the Mprize?

The Methuselah Foundation=92s The Methuselah Mouse Prize, known as the
MPrize, is one of a growing number of prizes that have been created in
recent years to stimulate innovation. In this case, the Mprize seeks to
promote research that will curtail or even reverse the aging process.
Specially, the Mprize rewards the producer of the world=92s oldest ever
mouse. The creators of the prize believe this will yield insights into
interventions that will help humans.

The funding of the prize is not from a single individual or donor, but
from anyone who wants to contribute, including many individuals who make
both large and small pledges that are collected over time. The amount of
the pledges are now over $4 million, and growing.

The Mprize is the brainchild of Aubrey de Grey, an eccentric researcher
from Cambridge University. [See: Sherwin Nuland, =93Do You Want to Live
Forever? Aubrey de Grey thinks he knows how to defeat aging. He=92s
brilliant, but is he nuts?,=94 MIT=92s Technology Review. February 2005].

 From the MPrize Web site:

http://www.mprize.org/index.php?pagename=3Dstructure
---------------
     Longevity Prize

     The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a
mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus
musculus, is exceeded.

     The amount won by a winner of the Longevity Prize is in
proportion to
the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the
margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:

     Previous record: X days
     New record: X+Y days
     Longevity Prize fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of
record-breaker
     Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))

     Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous
one, the
winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the
old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never
be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact
indefinitely. This is very different from a structure that specifies a
particular mouse age at which the whole fund is awarded. We believe
this to be a very important difference: public attention will be best
engaged and maintained by a steady stream of record-breaking events
that demonstrate scientists are taking progressively better control of
the aging process.

     The developers of a record-breaking intervention will receive prize
money every week from the point at which their oldest living mouse
beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be calculated
as though their mouse had just died, and the total amount won so far
by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the Mprize
web site.

     Rejuvenation Prize

     The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset
interventions and
has been instituted so as to satisfy two shortcomings of the Longevity
Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a
single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most
important end goal is to promote the development of interventions to
restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the
Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:

     1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse
but
for a published, peer-reviewed study. The study must satisfy the
following criteria:

     The treated and control groups must have consisted of at least
20 mice
each

     The intervention must have commenced at an age at least half of the
eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the control
group.

     The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five
different
markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there
must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of
those five markers in the treated mice at some time after treatment
began versus some time before it began. The experimenters select the
comparison times, both before and after. It is acceptable for other
markers to fail to show this reversal.

     2) The record that the next winner must beat is the mean age at
death
of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.

     Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same
rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age
involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the
study.

     The amount won by a successful new Rejuvenation Prize record is
calculated in the same way as for the Longevity Prize, but is only
awarded upon publication of the study in question. As for the
Longevity Prize, if the new record =96 the mean age at death of the
longest-lived 10% of the treated group - is twice the previous one,
the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than
the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund.

     A Footnote on Nomenclature and History

     During 2003 and 2004 the Longevity Prize had a couple of other
names.
It was known as the Biology Prize or the Postponement Prize, but its
structure and rules have not changed. The present Rejuvenation Prize
is the successor to a prize that was variously termed the Medicine
Prize, the Treatment Prize and the Reversal Prize, and which had a
different set of rules aimed at promoting work on late-onset
interventions.

----------------------------------------------
James Packard Love
Knowledge Ecology International
mailto:james.love@keionline.org
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / U.S. mobile+1.202.361.3040, Geneva mobile
+41.76.413.6584

"If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks." Bill Walton"