Hevolution Foundation: Saudi Arabia's Billion-Dollar Bet on Longevity

Hevolution Foundation is a Saudi-backed nonprofit, headquartered in Riyadh, that has committed to spending up to $1 billion a year on research into the biology of aging. That figure, confirmed in reporting by MIT Technology Review, would make Saudi Arabia the single largest sponsor of scientists trying to understand why bodies grow old and whether the process can be slowed. The foundation was established by royal order in December 2018 and is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who serves as chairman of its board of trustees.

The organization matters for a simple reason. Aging research has long been starved of money relative to the diseases that aging causes, and a funder writing checks at this scale can change what gets studied, who studies it, and where. It also matters because the money carries a return address. A field that prizes independence is now leaning on a fund tied to a government with a contested human rights record, and scientists are weighing the trade-offs in public.

What Hevolution is and what it funds

Hevolution describes its mission as extending healthspan, the years a person lives in good health, rather than simply stretching out lifespan. Chief executive Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist who later served as chief scientific officer at PepsiCo, framed the gap to Longevity.Technology this way: “There’s a log scale, if not two log scales, difference between funding for understanding how to keep people healthy versus treating consequences.” Khan has said the foundation is structured so that “100% of profits will be returned to the organisation to fund the science,” a design meant to allow longer time horizons and higher risk tolerance than a typical venture fund.

The foundation works on two tracks. One is research grants to academic scientists. The other is equity investment in biotech companies developing therapies aimed at age-related decline. The focus area is geroscience, the study of the basic mechanisms that link aging to disease, including cellular senescence, metabolism and the pathways targeted by drugs such as metformin and rapamycin. Readers tracking that pharmacology can see our explainer on longevity drugs including rapamycin, metformin and senolytics.

The grants and the scale so far

The early commitments were modest against the headline budget. Hevolution’s first announced grants, made with the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), totaled just over $10 million, roughly 1% of the annual ceiling, according to Longevity.Technology. The pace has since accelerated. At its 2025 Global Healthspan Summit, the foundation said it had launched more than $400 million in research grants over the previous 20 months, supporting more than 200 laboratories and over 250 scientists worldwide, including 245 researchers based in Saudi Arabia, as reported by Al Arabiya.

Individual awards have grown large. The same wave of funding included a roughly $40 million commitment to the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, which challenges teams to reverse markers of aging in older participants. The AFAR partnership, meanwhile, funds New Investigator Awards in geroscience worth $375,000 each over three years, supporting early-career scientists in the United States and Canada. Competition is steep. Khan told The Boston Globe the foundation was “oversubscribed, usually 10 to one,” citing a round in which around 390 scientists competed for 20 to 30 grants.

The TAME trial and the metformin question

One of the most closely watched projects in the field is TAME, short for Targeting Aging with Metformin. The study is designed to test whether the cheap, decades-old diabetes drug metformin can delay the onset of multiple age-related conditions at once, including heart disease, cancer and dementia, in thousands of older adults across US sites. It is often described as the first major attempt to test a drug against aging itself rather than a single disease.

Hevolution’s role in TAME has been less clear-cut than the field hoped. As MIT Technology Review reported, the foundation reached a preliminary agreement to fund roughly one-third of the trial, a commitment trial architect Nir Barzilai of Albert Einstein College of Medicine described publicly. A Hevolution representative later told STAT News that the organization had “not yet made any decisions” about funding specific projects. The episode captures a recurring tension: a trial estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars has struggled to secure stable funding even as billions flow into the broader field.

Positioning the Gulf at the center of aging research

Hevolution is also an instrument of national strategy. The foundation is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 push to diversify beyond oil and to build a knowledge economy, and longevity science is one of its flagship bets. The foundation has expanded outward from Riyadh, opening a North American headquarters in Boston in 2023, choosing the city, Khan told The Boston Globe, because “this was a very strategic move to where the activity is concentrated.” Its annual Global Healthspan Summit in Riyadh has become a fixture on the longevity calendar.

That ambition dovetails with a wider Gulf effort to brand the region as a hub for advanced and preventive medicine. Our coverage of longevity clinics in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and of Gulf medical tourism traces how that infrastructure is taking shape alongside the research funding.

The questions about soft power and independence

The central question scientists raise is whether money from a fund chaired by the crown prince can support genuinely independent work. As MIT Technology Review noted, the Saudi royal family has clear views about how society should run and an interest in burnishing its image. Hevolution executives counter that the foundation is a nonprofit, not an arm of the state, and that grants are awarded through competitive scientific review.

Others frame the dilemma more bluntly. Ethics specialist Jeff Moriarty told The Boston Globe that researchers “might wish you had different sources, but that’s not the world in which we live,” while another commentator in the same report warned that accepting the money risks “providing cover” for a government criticized over its human rights record. The same scrutiny has followed Saudi spending in sports and entertainment. Whether longevity science proves different will depend on how openly the foundation operates as its checks grow.

FAQ

How much does Hevolution Foundation spend on longevity research? The foundation has committed to spending up to $1 billion a year on aging and healthspan research, according to MIT Technology Review. By its 2025 Global Healthspan Summit it reported having launched more than $400 million in grants over the prior 20 months, per Al Arabiya.

Who runs Hevolution and who funds it? The chief executive is Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and ex-PepsiCo chief scientific officer. The foundation was created by royal order in December 2018 and is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as head of its board of trustees.

Is Hevolution funding the TAME metformin trial? Reporting by MIT Technology Review described a preliminary agreement for Hevolution to fund about one-third of the TAME trial, but a foundation representative later told STAT News it had not yet made final decisions on specific projects.

This article is journalism about a research funder, not medical advice. None of the therapies or drugs mentioned, including metformin, is established as a treatment for aging.

Sources

1. MIT Technology Review: Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
2. Longevity.Technology: Hevolution CEO on how to spend $1 billion a year on longevity
3. The Boston Globe: Saudi fund sets up in Boston to plow $1 billion a year into research and drugs to extend life
4. Al Arabiya: Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation commits millions to transform healthspan research
5. STAT News: As billionaires race to fund anti-aging projects, a much-discussed trial goes overlooked
6. American Federation for Aging Research: TAME - Targeting Aging with Metformin