The world is aging. In about ten years, the US will have more old (65+) people than children and this trend will only get worse over time. Age is the greatest risk factor for most diseases, including neurodegeneration and severe COVID-19 outcomes. Two third of people 65+ suffer from more than one chronic disease. With this, in the next decade healthcare in its current form will likely collapse under demographic pressure.

The premise of longevity research (also known as geroscience, or simply aging biology) is that the physiological changes that drive disease can be targeted directly. Doing so represents the most efficient way to reduce the incidence of a whole range of diseases. The past two decades have seen an abundance of evidence for this premise, including genetic and therapeutic effects that extend a healthy lifespan in mammals. Thus, solving aging is our strongest leverage on human health.

If you agree that solving aging is an important problem, then the two major questions you might have are “Why science and not startups?” and “Why Impetus?”. When it comes to solving complex scientific problems, there is often a big gap of unexplored ideas in the range of “too risky to be funded by the government” and “too unexplored to start a company around them”. The following projects have significantly shaped the current state of aging research but couldn't exist as a startup when they were first explored (they also received no governmental grants):

1) The most promising type of aging biomarker, DNA methylation clocks, was pioneered over six years by a lone professor with no grant funding for this work. If validated clinically, these biomarkers could accelerate clinical trials for aging by decades, since measurements could be done soon after treatments are started rather than waiting for human aging to take its course.

2) The potential to activate developmental programs to rejuvenate cells was demonstrated in living animals in work supported primarily by seven private foundations, not by the NIH. This idea is now a major topic in the field, and a billion-dollar foundation is now joining 4+ biotech companies set up to pursue its therapeutic potential (Altos Labs, New Limit).

3) Rejuvenation of old tissues by young blood was made by a postdoc in the Rando lab, with no direct grants to do this work. This topic is now the focus of 6+ labs, and multiple biotechs are working on identifying the specific circulating factors providing this effect.

4) The most comprehensive characterization of age-related changes in a mammal is available for the entire field to use and the entire project was sponsored by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with no support from the government.

The Longevity Impetus Grants’ review process is designed so that these and similar projects would be funded.

Currently, there is a need for agency that reliably supports non-incremental aging research without any delays. The National Institute on Aging, the primary support of all aging research in the United States, spends ~60% of its funding on Alzheimer’s and ~15% on social and behavioral research. In addition to this, governmental funding largely focuses on ideas that have little upside risk, leading to incremental progress. It should not come as a big surprise that the most important ideas in the aging field were either funded by private entities or pioneered without any funding. In private conversations, more than half of the researchers we’ve spoken with described bold research ideas that they either could not or did not attempt to get funded. We believe that massive breakthroughs are waiting among those ideas and want to empower researchers to spend their time on what they believe to be the most important problems.

Finally, researchers spend too much time writing and waiting for grants. A major NIH grant takes at least half of a year to prepare, requires multiple person-days to review, and funding typically arrives more than a year after the application. This pace is much too slow and wastes the time of scientists who could help us advance faster. Our process is ~15x faster than traditional NIH grants: researchers can prepare an Impetus Grant application in ~1 day, receive funding within 4 weeks, and then start working on their ambitious projects.

Our main focus is on ideas that advance the practical application of longevity research but are unlikely to get funded through traditional grants. We also welcome applications with a significant risk of failure and proposals to build infrastructure that would accelerate the field but do not in themselves generate new discoveries (e.g. a new, accessible animal colony).

We are unlikely to fund projects to spin out existing research from academia (other funding sources exist for this), or that focus on details of well-studied topics in aging biology.

We are particularly interested in funding projects around:

1) Development and/or validation of interpretable, mechanistic biomarkers that predict age-related outcomes in humans and animals and respond to interventions.

2) Development and application of assays to measure causal and temporal relationships between different mechanisms of aging in cells and organs.

3) Improving translation of preclinical findings, e.g. through better/more accessible animal models, or by testing the context-dependence of known aging modulators.

In the fall of 2021, we made 96 awards, each within three weeks of the application. We estimate that ~26% of these would not have received funding through traditional sources. Overall, the first round of Impetus will lead to 4 clinical trials, 11 new tools to measure biology, 7 biomarkers, 25 broadly useful datasets, and 10 therapeutic candidates. 19 of the studies will go on to challenge the current assumptions the field has about aging. 11 of the applications proposed new promising protocols for lifespan extension and 15 of funded projects will go on to test the existing therapies in a more rigorous way, to prove or disprove their contribution to healthspan. We also funded work on 2 new model organisms, so we are hopeful that future studies will soon benefit from better models. While we mostly focused on research, there were also a few projects that would otherwise boost progress in the field of aging research, such as an initiative to extend the WHO classification of aging as a driver of disease, and a database compiling past lifespan experiments for better comparability. We also supported many ideas that are likely to fail and, by failing, would give us more knowledge than successful but incremental research ever could. We are proud that 21% of the first round went to Ph.D. students and postdocs who are not normally eligible for governmental grants. No one should wait to get to higher “academic ranks” to test their ideas.

The reviewer team is anonymous (this is essential for double-blinded reviewing). Reviewers’ affiliations include Stanford, the Buck Institute, UCLA, USC, Calico, NIA, University of Washington, Sloan Kettering, and similar institutions. Reviewers are selected for their knowledge of the field, history of pushing forward the whole field, and minimal bias towards their own topic of research.

All of the donations are tax-deductible, with grants administered through the newly formed 501(c)3 public charity Norn Group.

Capital calls will be made on committed contributions when grant applications are ready to be funded, pro-rata distributed between all commitments.

Close to 90% of the funding will go directly to scientists. Max 10% of awarded funds will go to overhead at recipient institutions (Normal institutional overhead is 30-100+%).

Norn Group will continue to distribute the Impetus grants with less than 1% overhead. Reviewing scientists are offered a small fee (~$120/h), which is unusual but we believe appropriate. Additional information on funding distribution can be found on our Financial Transparency Page.