ARPA-H awards research teams to add more healthy years to Americans’ lives as they age

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ARPA-H awards research teams to add more healthy years to Americans’ lives as they age

PROSPR program will identify early markers of aging and conduct the first clinical trials aimed at extending the number of years people live in good health 

Today, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the seven research teams across the United States funded through its PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program. The awardees will develop tools and therapies aimed at extending healthspan, or the number of years people live in good health, by detecting and intervening on the earliest changes associated with aging. 

Despite overall increases in life expectancy, most Americans spend many years managing chronic conditions and the functional limitations associated with aging. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 90% of adults over 65 have at least one chronic condition and about 80% have two or more. PROSPR aims to dramatically change this accepted trajectory by providing Americans with therapeutics that target the biology of aging directly.  

“Defeating chronic, debilitating diseases will not just take new therapies, but novel and evidence-based prevention approaches,” said ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson, Ph.D. “PROSPR represents a tectonic shift in how we study healthy aging. ARPA-H will push the envelope on new biomarkers, interventions, and clinical trial designs that bring us closer to therapies that can help all Americans stay healthier for longer.”  

The reason therapeutics to extend healthspan don’t exist is because of the long process of aging. Clinical trials would take too long to wait for a disease or disability to manifest as an indication that a drug is working or not. PROSPR will use the wealth of previously collected longitudinal data available to identify which factors (biomarkers) are the earliest responders to long-term health outcomes. These identified biomarkers will be used as surrogates of long-term health outcomes to test the efficacy of new and repurposed therapeutics in healthspan clinical trials. Awarded PROSPR performer teams will pioneer in-home and decentralized trial designs that can measure health outcomes from aging over the course of one to three years instead of the decades that traditional approaches would take. The program’s goal is to enable a new “healthspan industry,” focused on preserving health, maintaining independence, and avoiding prolonged treatments for late-stage disease. 

“Building PROSPR has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I’m excited to collaborate with the teams to execute this vision,” said ARPA-H PROSPR Program Manager Andrew Brack, Ph.D. “These teams will define the earliest physiological and biochemical changes that predict long-term health outcomes and use them to fast-track clinically validated therapies that aim to dramatically extend healthspan for millions of aging Americans.”  

The PROSPR program is investing up to $144 million over five years. As with all ARPA-H programs, the performer teams will not receive a grant, but rather contracts that vary in funding amount per awardee and are contingent upon each team meeting aggressive research milestones.   

Performer teams are led by:  

  • Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA will harmonize the vast existing health datasets collected by multiple institutions to generate a healthspan score (PROSPR-IC score). They will test the accuracy and intervenability of this score in a 1-year lifestyle intervention, which will be supported by an in-home digital health assessment technology they develop.  
  • The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in San Antonio, TX will establish a regulatory path for testing the efficacy of therapeutics for aging by conducting a phase 3 hybrid trial to repurpose three FDA-approved drugs: SGLT2 inhibitor, rapamycin, and semaglutide.  
  • Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, NY, aims to identify biomarkers that are responsive to interventions that improve aging outcomes in humans by performing combined analysis of multiple, previously performed intervention trials.  
  • Apollo Alpha in St. Petersburg, FL will test whether an orally bioavailable compound that crosses the blood–brain barrier and targets energy homeostasis, lipid metabolism, and inflammation will improve aging outcomes. 
  • Cambrian BioPharma in New York, NY will test whether a daily, oral, novel rapamycin analog will improve aging outcomes.  
  • Linnaeus Therapeutics in Haddonfield, NJ, will test whether a compound with an established safety profile, demonstrated cardiometabolic benefits, and once-daily dosing improves aging outcomes. 
  • The University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, will evaluate whether a compound with an established human safety profile and high relative potency within its class, can improve aging-related outcomes. 

To learn more about PROSPR, visit the program page.