Organs for transplant could one day sit "on the shelf" until the right recipient turns up. That is the goal of the Organ Biostasis Prize, which Anousheh Ansari, CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, named as the winner of this year's Visioneering. She discussed it with XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur Salim Ismail and Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, on an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis recorded on October 16, 2026, and published the next day.
XPRIZE runs incentive prizes: it sets a measurable target and pays whoever reaches it first. Visioneering is the step where the foundation chooses what to target next. Its October 8 announcement described a year-long process ending in a summit scheduled for October 15 to 17 in Malibu, where six concepts, two each from health; food, water and waste; and energy, climate and nature, were to be pitched. Participants would score the proposals, debate, vote and commit seed funding.
The conversation covered five prizes or prize ideas, at very different stages.
Organ biostasis: buying time for transplants
Ansari said organ transplant recipients in the summit audience talked about how hard it is to wait, for themselves or a loved one, for a matching organ to come in time. Once an organ is harvested, she said, its life is "very, very limited."
Diamandis put the kidney waiting list "on the order of a hundred thousand," with long lists for hearts, livers and lungs too. He described himself as a registered organ donor whose organs might one day have no match nearby. Biostasis means pausing an organ's biology, either by deep cooling (cryogenic biostasis) or by slowing its metabolism, so that it can wait until a recipient matches.
The two disagreed about where the field stands. Ansari said the prize's target is six months of storage and that she thought the current maximum was about two weeks. Diamandis countered that the maximum today is hours, and the conversation noted that it depends on the organ. Diamandis credited Martine Rothblatt with "amazing work" on systems that keep an organ alive by circulating fluid through it, but said solving the shortage needs much longer storage.
The competition will be run in pigs, Diamandis said. Teams will have to harvest a pig's organs, hold them in biostasis, take them out "some number of months later," transplant them back and keep the animal viable. Ismail said one competitor, Sebastian, has worked on the problem for more than a dozen years.
Published research shows what this kind of science looks like at a smaller scale. In a 2023 study in rats, researchers turned kidneys into an ice-free glassy state, stored them for between 1 and 100 days, rewarmed them with nanoparticles heated by magnetic fields and transplanted them into five rats. All five survived the 30-day follow-up, as did five rats given fresh kidneys. The stored kidneys worked worse at first and reached the healthy range only by day 23. The authors noted the small sample, the rat-sized organs and the short follow-up as limits. The study has no established connection to any prize competitor.
Habitable Worlds: AI and telescope data
The furthest along financially is the Habitable Worlds XPRIZE. Diamandis said entrepreneur John Davey "just stepped up to fund" it. Telescopes are producing petabytes of data, Diamandis said, and astronomers have found about 6,200 planets around other stars but no Earth-like one yet. Davey's aim, he said, is to make data from the major telescopes available and let people "use the latest AI to find habitable worlds."
Ansari said Davey "funded the whole prize"; Diamandis said he put up $5 million. Ansari called it an example of how AI will help, "because we have the data. We just need to find that needle in a haystack."
Accelerate Learning: first graders in India and Africa
Ansari described Accelerate Learning as the next version of XPRIZE's learning competition. Instead of only measuring how effective learning systems are, she said, it will require them to change the system and be deployed at mass scale, in and outside schools. It will be tested in India and Africa, where she cited shortages of teachers and teaching materials, and it targets first graders, "because I think that's where we can have the biggest impact."
The competition page presents the prize as still being designed and seeking sponsors. Its stated ambitions include reaching nearly one million children and cutting the time to master basic reading and math from four years to one, with mastery demonstrated under real-world conditions.
A UAP prize to counter stigma
Diamandis said XPRIZE is working on a prize about UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, the current term for what were once called UFOs. One thing prizes are good for, he argued, is breaking stigma. He pointed to cold fusion: after early results were not replicated, he said, work stopped because researchers saw it as a career risk. UAPs are in a similar position, in his view, although "there's so much evidence that there's something going on. Don't know what it is yet."
The prize would reward anyone who can "demonstrate or verify in some fashion" what is happening, Diamandis said. XPRIZE is talking to a major funder. When people call it risky, he said, his answer is that "that's what we're supposed to do."
A flow prize, so far just an idea
The last idea came up in the conversation itself: a Flow XPRIZE to put people into flow, the state of deep, absorbed focus. Diamandis said his coauthor Steven Kotler, who has researched individual and group flow with the Flow Collective, "would love that," and called it "a great idea." Ismail said flow can be measured through things like coherence, "so you can now test how much you can do it." Diamandis agreed: "it is measurable." No funder or design for it was mentioned, and Diamandis asked listeners to suggest the prizes they would like to see.