Advancing to the Finals to put a Japanese approach to healthy longevity to the test

Japan Longevity Consortium (JLC), led by Shigeo Horie, MD, PhD, Specially Appointed Professor at Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine, has been selected as one of the 20 Finalist teams in XPRIZE Healthspan, the global science and technology competition organised by the XPRIZE Foundation. With a total prize purse of $101 million, the competition calls for breakthrough solutions that substantially extend human healthspan.

JLC brings together researchers from Juntendo University, the University of Tokyo, the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, and the Japan Institute for Health Security (JIHS), together with clinicians, engineers, occupational therapists, chefs, actors, and dance and yoga instructors. The team also works in partnership with the Yamaha Music Foundation. Its goal is to analyse traditional Japanese ways of living through advanced biomedical science and translate them into a programme that anyone can practise, contributing to longer healthspan worldwide.

More than 600 teams from 58 countries entered the competition. Following its selection among the world’s top 40 teams in May 2025, JLC has now advanced to the 20 teams competing in the Finals. “It is an honour to be chosen as one of the 20 teams advancing to the Finals from a field of more than 600,” said Professor Horie. “Our mission is to translate the wisdom embedded in Japanese ways of living into the language of science, and to put it into a form that people anywhere in the world can practise.”

About the programme

We call the programme JLC will deliver in the Finals “Scientific Zen.” Its starting point is an epidemiological study of mortality among Zen priests. In a 24-year follow-up of 4,352 Japanese male Zen priests, the standardised mortality ratio for all causes was 0.82 relative to the general male population in Japan — approximately 18% lower mortality (Ogata M, Ikeda M, Kuratsune M. Mortality among Japanese Zen priests. J Epidemiol Community Health. 1984;38:161–166). This is an observational study and does not establish causation. But it raises the question our programme was built to answer: within the Zen way of life — seated meditation, diet, mindful physical work and sutra chanting — where do the determinants of healthy longevity actually lie, and can today’s measurement technology reveal them?

What distinguishes JLC is its treatment of “Flow” — a state of deep immersion — not as a mood but as a physiological state that can be induced, quantified and dosed. A proprietary EEG-derived Flow index, paired with continuous heart-rate variability monitoring, allows the intensity of the intervention to be adjusted in real time (Japanese Patent No. 7892319). Scientific Zen comprises five modules built around this Flow induction, delivered over twelve months in the Finals:

• Exercise (resistance and aerobic training)

• Dietary guidance (a Japanese whole-food diet with mild fasting)

• Choral singing (to induce neural synchronisation)

• Cognitive work (adaptive attentional load)

• AI-supported daily coaching at home

The Finals

In the Finals, JLC will conduct a randomised controlled trial in 120 participants to evaluate the effects of Scientific Zen, targeting at least ten years of rejuvenation across three domains: muscle function, cognitive function and immune function. Data will be submitted to the evaluation infrastructure shared by all Finalist teams — the University of Utah Data Coordinating Center and the UCSD Central Laboratory — and assessed against the same standard as every other team at the final judging in 2030.

Bringing Japanese science to the world

This selection reflects growing international recognition of JLC’s integrated approach, uniting science, tradition and personalised medicine. We will continue to drive innovation in healthy longevity for the world.

Partnership opportunities

JLC welcomes partners of all kinds — companies, local governments and individual supporters — to help deliver the Finals clinical trial and bring the programme into wider use. We are committed to co-creation across sectors and industries so that a longevity solution developed in Japan can reach the world.