Known as the Grand Challenge on Maximising Healthy and Successful Longevity, Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung announced the launch during the National Medical Research Council Awards Ceremony and Research Symposium 2026 on Friday (May 22).
The Grand Challenge is part of the National Research Foundation’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 (RIE 2030), aimed at supporting research in areas of the highest strategic and economic value. Healthy longevity, in this case, is one of them.
“We will further invest in research that focuses on the ageing population. Longevity is something to celebrate, especially in Asia,” said Ong. “But it also brings new challenges, such as cognitive decline and loss of physical function. We want to live long, but we also want to live well.”
Public-private partnership
The Grand Challenge is open to industry, researchers, and public institutions, who can collaborate to develop strong use cases and test innovations in real world settings.
Ong said that there has been a growing number of technology companies that have come forward with ideas and proposals in preventive care, ageing and longevity.
He said that this reflected the private sector’s ability and readiness to contribute to public health, and hence the launch of the Grand Challenge to tap into these opportunities.
“We encourage industry to participate – many are already in Singapore, and working on promising innovations in both preventive and acute care. They can partner with local researchers and institutions to first develop strong, concrete use cases, before testing, validating and implementing in Singapore’s real care settings," he said, adding that intellectual property will be co-owned by the public and private sector players.
Selected public-private research collaborations will be able to leverage the Trusted Research and Real World-Data Utilisation and Sharing Tech (TRUST). This is the national analytics platform that facilitates access to nearly 50 anonymised health and health-related datasets for research use.
The RIE 2030 was first announced last December and the Singapore government had then expressed interest in healthy longevity research, so as to deepen the understanding of the biology of aging and enable early, effective intervention.
By 2030, around one in four Singaporeans will be 65 or older. Today, there is about a 10-year age gap between lifespan and healthspan for Singaporeans.
Areas of interest
According to the NRF, this Grand Challenge will focus on three areas, namely brain health, physical function and socio-environmental innovations.
For physical function, conditions such as sarcopenic obesity, characterized by simultaneous muscle loss and fat accumulation, are specific areas of interest.
Ong pointed out that sarcopenic obesity could affect Asians at a lower body mass index (BMI) and earlier in life than Western populations.
He added that the condition could significantly increase the risk of frailty in older adults.
When it comes to brain health, the research interests include vascular dementia, which accounts for nearly half of all dementia cases in Singapore, which is roughly twice the proportion seen in Western populations.
“By addressing our knowledge gaps, we can develop new tests for vascular dementia or devise novel interventions that may delay its onset, progression or clinical impact,” said Ong.
In addition, the Grand Challenge is seeking innovations in socio-environment, including the optimization of the built environment, social systems, and digital health technologies to support healthy ageing in the community.
Professor Chong Yap Seng, dean of the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, will be leading and coordinating the Grand Challenge as its executive director.
Beyond health: Business and economic opportunities
Promoting research in new areas could serve multiple purposes, ranging from health and social objectives to driving new economic opportunities.
Ong recounted that Singapore identified biomedical and life sciences as a new pillar for economic growth in 2000, and over the years, transitioned from basic science research to translational and clinical research as early as 2006.
“We built strong basic science capabilities by attracting and nurturing strong, top talent and developing our research infrastructure. We soon realized that basic sciences alone were not enough...” he said. “There is the economic, social and health objectives. To achieve this, promising discoveries must find their way from the laboratories into clinical practice or markets – that means from bench to bedside.”
Last year, Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB) also called for greater collaboration with the industry, researchers, and investors to advance longevity science, services, and product innovation during the Founders Longevity Forum.
Aside from longevity research, the Ministry of Health will also commit SGD$2.5 billion (US$1.95bn) over the next five years as part of the RIE2030 Plan to strengthen translational and clinical research.
The focus would be on precision medicine, where public healthcare clusters will work together to sequence the genomes of 400,000 to 450,000 participants - about 10% of Singapore’s resident population.
Ong said this would generate robust, localized evidence on how genomics can be integrated into the delivery of healthcare responsibly and effectively, both in clinical and economic terms.
Artificial Intelligence tools and models trained on the local clinical practice guidelines and clinical data will also be built. The AI models are designed to flag out patients at risk and suggest care pathways for clinicians to consider.
