Multiple biotechs and academic institutions among recipients of funding for trials of therapeutics designed to extend healthspan.
The US Government, via its Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) initiative, is putting up to $144 million into multiple projects aimed at extending healthspan – the years people live in good health. Through its PROSPR program, ARPA-H is funding seven research teams working to treat aging as a tractable biological process, and proving, in humans, that intervening earlier can help people stay healthier for longer.
Short for “Proactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience,” PROSPR’s goal is to overcome one of the key challenges that has limited clinical development in geroscience: aging is slow, and its associated diseases and conditions can take years or decades to emerge, making conventional trials unwieldy and expensive. The initiative aims to use longitudinal human data to identify early, actionable biomarkers that respond before late-stage outcomes appear. Those biomarkers are intended to serve as surrogate endpoints that can show, within one to three years, whether an intervention is plausibly shifting an individual’s trajectory toward better function, resilience, and quality of life.
“PROSPR represents a tectonic shift in how we study healthy aging,” said ARPA-H Director Dr Alicia Jackon. “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.”
To make that work at scale, ARPA-H’s stated intent is not only to generate data on specific therapies, but to build the clinical infrastructure that would make future healthspan trials faster to design, easier to fund, and more credible to regulators and clinicians.
“I built PROSPR because I kept seeing the same story play out: brilliant scientists uncover exciting ways to target the biology of aging in animal models, only to have those ideas sit on the shelf because there’s no clear path to test them in humans.” said PROSPR Program Manager Dr Andrew Brack in a post on LinkedIn. “I wanted to change that. I’m excited, not just as a scientist, but as someone who’s watched too many promising aging interventions stall, to see what these teams can discover when we finally give them a path to human evidence.”
About the funded projects
The seven funded teams span academia and biotech, with projects ranging from data harmonization and endpoint development to testing repurposed drugs and advancing novel compounds. On the biotech side, Cambrian BioPharma and Linnaeus Therapeutics offer a window into what ARPA-H appears to be prioritizing: therapies with plausible multi-system effects, dosing and tolerability that could fit preventive use, and development plans that support the demand for measurable, earlier readouts of functional aging.
Longevity biotech Cambrian has been awarded up to $30.8 million to support human trials of a daily, oral, next-generation rapamycin analog intended to selectively inhibit mTORC1. The company views dysregulated mTORC1 signaling as a key driver of the metabolic decline that accumulates with age, and it is tying its program to “intrinsic capacity,” a composite measure of physical and metabolic resilience that declines over time.
“We founded Cambrian to lay the groundwork for treating some of today’s most debilitating diseases at the molecular level, before they cause disease,” said Cambrian CEO James Peyer. “Improving intrinsic capacity is the perfect expression of that mission, yet no drug development effort has ever attempted to target it. PROSPR is the first. Efforts like this are what allow us to push into new frontiers of medicine.”
Linnaeus has been awarded up to $22 million to advance a drug targeting the G protein-coupled estrogen receptor (GPER) into human trials for healthspan preservation. Interestingly, the company is building on its work in oncology, where more than 100 cancer patients have been treated with its drug (LNS8801) in early human trials and signals observed in those patients suggested potential translation into aging-related benefits.
“LNS8801 has a mechanism of action expected to provide benefits in multiple organ systems,” said Linnaeus CEO Dr Patrick Mooney. “ARPA-H’s evaluation of our data and subsequent award validates the promise of LNS8801 to potentially prevent diseases of aging and will enable a rigorous program to translate that promise into clinically meaningful improvements in healthspan-predictive outcomes.”
The Cambrian and Linnaeus awards highlight how ARPA-H is trying to create a path that is rigorous enough to convince regulators and clinicians, but agile enough to generate answers within a few years.
“The Geroscience Hypothesis has never been tested in humans at this scale, with this rigor, with endpoints specifically designed to capture what we care about,” said Peyer in a post on LinkedIn. “Building those endpoints, validating them, and running clean clinical trials with novel compounds in healthy people: that’s the work ahead, at the edge of knowledge, where real advancements get made.”
One other biotech company awarded funding was the mysterious “Apollo Alpha” – a company without a web site and presumably still operating in stealth mode. According to ARPA-H, it is evaluating an orally bioavailable compound designed to cross the blood–brain barrier and target energy homeostasis, lipid metabolism, and inflammation.
Several leading academic institutions also secured ARPA-H funding, including Stanford University for its work to harmonize existing datasets collected across institutions to generate a healthspan score and then test its accuracy and ability to change in a one-year lifestyle intervention supported by an in-home digital assessment technology platform. The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is being funded to pursue a regulatory path for testing therapeutics for aging by running a phase 3 hybrid trial that repurposes three FDA-approved drugs (an SGLT2 inhibitor, rapamycin, and semaglutide) into a trial structure explicitly oriented around aging-related outcomes.
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health will analyze multiple previously conducted intervention trials to identify biomarkers that change with interventions tied to improved aging outcomes, while the University of Rochester received funding to test a compound with an established human safety profile and high relative potency in its class for improving aging-related outcomes.
ARPA-H is committing its funding over five years, structured as contracts rather than traditional grants, with funding levels varying by team and tied to the achievement of key milestones.
“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,” added Brack.
