Wanted: Innovative ideas promoting healthy longevity

NAM Healthy Longevity Catalyst Awards offers $50k seed funding to bold ideas that can extend the human healthspan.

As part of the Healthy Longevity Global Competition, the National Academy of Medicine is seeking ideas that promote health, functioning, meaning, purpose, and/or dignity for people as they age for the 2024 cycle of its US-based Catalyst Awards.

My take on this: Bold is the watchword for these awards, with the NAM actively seeking exciting and transformative new or early-stage projects that aim to extend the human healthspan, in turn allowing individuals to stay active in their communities, families, and the workforce well into their later years. The NAM especially welcomes approaches that challenge existing paradigms or propose new methodologies or concepts. High-risk ideas that could potentially yield high rewards and, in turn, dramatically change the field of healthy longevity are encouraged, and ideas or projects that aim to reduce health disparities, promote health equity, combat ageism, or apply human-centered design principles to engage older adults in the work, are also of high interest to the NAM.

To find out more about the motivation behind the awards, we sat down with Michele Toplitz, Director of the NAM Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge.

“Dramatic breakthroughs in medicine, public health, and social and economic development have resulted in unprecedented extensions of the human lifespan over the past century,” Toplitz. “As of 2018, for the first time ever, people over the age of 65 started to outnumber those under five. By 2050, 1 in 6 people worldwide will be over the age of 65, and the global population of the ‘oldest old’ – people aged 80 and older – is expected to triple.”

Toplitz explains that the National Academy of Medicine recognized not only the urgency, but also the immense opportunity presented by this demographic shift, and in 2019, it launched the Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge – a worldwide movement to improve physical, mental, and social well-being for people as they age.

Under the Healthy Longevity Global Competition, Catalyst Awards are open to innovators in more than 50 countries and territories!" says Toplitz, explaining that since 2020, the NAM and 11 global partners have issued 540 Catalyst Awards worth $27.5 million.

"The Global Competition seeks innovative ideas from all disciplines and sectors that aim to improve health as we age," she added.

Find out more about the NAM Healthy Longevity Catalyst Awards right HERE.

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