Longevity had a tumultuous year for funding in 2026, especially in the United States. After our previous piece looking at private funding of ageing biotech, we’ll next examine 2025 in public funding, and some updates on XPRIZE Healthspan.

The biggest news in science in 2025 has come out of the United States. The US National Institutes on Health (NIH) are still the largest source of public funding for biomedical research globally and, within that, the National Institute on Aging funds research into longevity and the basic biology of ageing.

However, the President’s Budget Request proposed cutting NIH funding overall by around 40%, and reducing the NIA budget by a similar amount. If these cuts are passed on proportionally to the NIA’s Division of Aging Biology (the focus for most of the research directly on ageing), that would take US federal funding of longevity science from $1.04 per American to 62 cents.

Longevity and prevention are among the current US administration’s priorities, and there is still considerable uncertainty around these cuts which are part of the negotiations in the US budgetary adoption process. However, there has been substantial disruption and uncertainty in both NIH and Health and Human Services throughout 2025—and the consequences of the ongoing upheaval are hard to measure.

Globally, ageing biology commands only a tiny fraction of research funding. While figures for other countries are harder to come by because few have a specific government institute dedicated to ageing, it seems likely that investment in Europe is even lower than in the US. According to one analysis published in August 2025, just 0.08% of the EU’s Horizon programme’s ‘Pillar 2’ funds research into ageing—a tiny fraction of the 17% of this funding invested in health overall.

Preliminary research by The Longevity Initiative suggests European countries likely invest cents or pence per person per year in ageing science, in spite of the fact that ageing causes over 90% of deaths in most European countries—an even larger share than in the US. The LI plans to work to make longevity science a priority for governments in the UK, Europe and around the world.

XPRIZE updates: could prizes be a useful funding mechanism?

XPRIZE Healthspan is the world’s largest ever prize, and it’s aimed squarely at healthy longevity. Participating teams are competing to improve cognitive function, muscle performance and immunity in human volunteers. In May 2025, the group announced 100 semifinalists from over 600 registered teams, 40 of whom received $250,000 each to support their ongoing work, including clinical trials. Since May 2025, teams have been working on demonstrating that their interventions are effective at improving the measures of healthspan defined by the competition—early results are expected in 2026.

XPRIZE Healthspan is also offering $10,000 grants to researchers to help them develop the measures of function that will be used in judging success. This serious attempt to create measurable ‘biomarkers’ for healthspan is another way in which the prize could have a substantial multiplier effect: biomarkers are a critical part of reducing the cost of longevity trials in future—accurate, agreed-upon measures of function will allow faster, cheaper trials, meaning that researchers can do more for less.

While even a $101 million prize pot arguably isn’t a sufficient response to the multi-trillion dollar cost of ageing—nor even a replacement for the almost $400 million invested annually by the NIA’s Division of Aging Biology—it is a test for prizes as a funding mechanism for longevity science. Prizes have a large potential multiplier effect per dollar invested: the combined effort of all participating teams should result in the total resources brought to bear exceeding the scale of the prize. They also help uncover great ideas wherever they may be found—a prize can incentivise participation from the public, philanthropic and private sectors together.

While prizes can’t entirely substitute for public funding of research, there is substantial precedent for using them to accelerate medical innovation. For example, the previous Trump administration promised to purchase COVID-19 vaccines if proven to be safe and effective as part of Operation Warp Speed—providing manufacturers with the reassurance to scale up more rapidly, and unlocking enormous economic benefits.

Government promises to purchase treatments that extend healthy lifespan could be used to accelerate longevity R&D—something we hope to investigate in 2026.

This is part of our New Year 2026 series on 2025 in longevity. Read the next piece, on public funding for longevity science, tomorrow (January 8th).