XPRIZE Healthspan names ten finalists

XPRIZE Healthspan named ten finalists on 3 September 2026, narrowing a seven-year competition with a $101 million prize pool whose grand prize winners are due to be announced in 2030. Among them is Minicircle, which receives a $1 million finalist award.

Minicircle’s entry is a placebo-controlled interventional human clinical trial of a scalable combination gene therapy aimed at ageing itself. The platform uses non-viral circular DNA vectors to deliver modular, redosable multi-gene interventions, targeting four processes at once: muscle decline, neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction and immune dysregulation.

The competition’s design is what makes the finalist stage a real marker rather than a press event. XPRIZE Healthspan asks teams to demonstrate restored function — muscle, cognition, immunity — in older adults, which forces entrants into human trials with measured endpoints rather than biomarker panels or mouse lifespan curves. A field that has struggled to define what counts as evidence gets a common scoreboard.

Reaching the finals is not a result. None of the ten has yet shown that its intervention restores function in people, and the trials that would show it are what the next four years are for.