The federal government is awarding up to $144 million in five-year contracts to several universities and other biomedical research organizations to study medical interventions for age-related illnesses.
Seven awards are being made by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The funding is part of ARPA-H’s PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program, an initiative aimed at promoting healthy longevity and better understanding and treating the underlying causes of age-related disease.
Associated with an overall increase in their life expectancy, most Americans develop chronic conditions and functional limitations as they grow older. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 90% of individuals over 65 have at least one chronic condition, and about 80% have two or more. PROSPR aims to change this by providing Americans with medications and other interventions 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, in a press release. “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.”
PROSPR will use already available longitudinal data to help identify factors that can be used as biological surrogates for long-term health outcomes. PROSPR teams will develop in-home clinical trials that can measure age-related health outcomes over a one-to-three year time span instead of the decades that are usually involved. It aims to create a new “healthspan industry,” focused “on preserving health, maintaining independence, and avoiding prolonged treatments for late-stage disease.”
The cumulative $144 million in contracts, which vary in individual funding amounts, will be contingent on each team meeting specified research milestones.
The 7 teams are being led by Stanford University; the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Apollo Alpha in St. Petersburg, Florida; Cambrian BioPharma in New York City; Linnaeus Therapeutics in Haddonfield, New Jersey; and the University of Rochester.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is being awarded up to $38 million. Researchers at its Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies will evaluate the repurposing of three FDA-approved medications — rapamycin, dapagliflozin and semaglutide — to delay age-related health and functional decline in generally healthy middle-aged adults, ages 60 to 65.
The trial will use wearable technologies to monitor participant during a period in their lives where functional decline is measurable, but disease risk remains relatively low. Participants will be recruited from South Texas, a region with a demographic makeup that is similar to the projected U.S. population in the future, making the results relevant to the country overall.
“By reframing aging as a modifiable functional trajectory rather than an inevitable accumulation of disease, the study establishes a scalable, regulatory-grade framework for preventive interventions that could possibly inform future clinical development and positively affect people’s lives as they age,” said Elena Volpi, director of the Barshop Institute.
Researchers at the University of Rochester are being given a $22 million contract to evaluate whether a drug originally developed to treat HIV can suppress a chronic immune response triggered by the body’s own DNA. The project will involve a collaboration between University of Rochester scientists and others from Brown University, University of Connecticut, The University of Texas Medical Branch, University of Texas Health Houston, University of Nebraska, and Transposon Therapeutics.
The research will focus on the action of retrotransposons, which are part of the human genome. Unlike actual viruses, transposons don’t infect other cells, but they do become increasingly active with age, sending something like a false alarm to the immune system that the body is being attacked by a virus. This process may help explain why the aging process underlies many chronic illnesses. As people grow older, their cells begin to mistake their own genetic material as threats, triggering chronic inflammation that contributes to physical and cognitive declines.
Stanford University researchers are being contracted to use health datasets collected by multiple institutions to create a new health-span score (PROSPR-IC score). They will test the accuracy of this score in a 1-year lifestyle intervention that will employ a newly developed in-home digital health assessment technology.
The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has been awarded a grant to identify biomarkers that are responsive to interventions aimed at improving aging outcomes. The project, called FAST — Facilitating Aging Studies with Translational data — will analyze existing clinical trial data involving pharmacological agents known to have broad geroprotective properties.
According to the agency’s announcement, the remaining three projects will all assess the effectiveness of various pharmacological agents in mitigating age-related diseases. Apollo Alpha 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 was awarded a $30.8 million contract to assess whether a daily, oral, rapamycin analog will have therapeutic benefits. Linnaeus Therapeutics is being given $22 million to will test whether an oral drug candidate can preserve “intrinsic capacity,” defined as the integrated physical and cognitive abilities that underpin independence and resilience later in life.