The Federal Government Is Spending $144 Million to Crack the Code on Aging. Here Are the Seven Teams Racing to Do It.

For decades, the geroscience community has argued that aging itself — not individual diseases — should be a therapeutic target. The argument has been compelling in mouse models and frustrating in practice, because the FDA has no regulatory pathway for approving a drug that treats "aging," and clinical trials measuring healthspan need decades of follow-up that no funder wants to pay for.

ARPA-H just bet $144 million that both problems are solvable. The agency's PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience program — PROSPR — has selected seven research teams to run the most ambitious aging intervention trials ever attempted in the United States. The approach is vintage ARPA: compress timelines, demand measurable milestones, fund both established drugs and novel compounds, and accept failure as the price of speed. (Granted News)

Why PROSPR Exists

The fundamental bottleneck in aging research is not scientific imagination. It is measurement. If you want to test whether rapamycin extends healthy lifespan in humans, you need a trial that tracks participants for ten to twenty years. That trial will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, require thousands of participants, and produce results that arrive long after the researchers who designed it have retired.

PROSPR's design hypothesis is that biomarker surrogates — molecular and functional measures of biological aging — can compress those timelines to one to three years. If you can measure aging accurately enough, you do not need to wait for people to develop Alzheimer's or heart failure to know whether an intervention is working. You measure the upstream biological processes and declare success or failure years earlier.

This is not a new idea. What is new is a federal agency with $144 million and the contractual authority to demand that teams hit milestones or lose funding. ARPA-H uses contracts, not grants, which means each team's continued funding depends on demonstrating measurable progress at predefined intervals. There is no renewal process, no study section, and no five-year waiting period for R01 resubmission. You deliver or you stop.

The Seven Teams

PROSPR spans three distinct research strategies: repurposing FDA-approved drugs, testing novel compounds, and building the measurement infrastructure that makes both possible.

UT Health San Antonio — The VITAL-H Trial

The largest single award — up to $38 million — goes to the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at UT Health San Antonio. Led by Dr. Elena Volpi, the VITAL-H trial will test three FDA-approved medications head-to-head in a Phase 3 hybrid trial enrolling 726 adults in their 60s.

The three drugs are rapamycin, the mTOR inhibitor that has extended lifespan in nearly every organism tested; dapagliflozin, an SGLT2 inhibitor originally developed for diabetes that shows broad metabolic benefits; and semaglutide, the GLP-1 receptor agonist better known as the active ingredient in Ozempic. All three have extensive post-marketing safety data, which allows the trial to move directly to Phase 3 without the years of dose-finding studies that novel compounds require.

The trial design uses the WHO's Intrinsic Capacity framework — measuring cognition, mobility, psychological health, vitality, and sensory function — to assess whether any of the three drugs slows age-related functional decline. The South Texas enrollment focus is deliberate: the region's demographics approximate the projected U.S. population of 2040, making results more generalizable than trials conducted at coastal academic medical centers with predominantly white, affluent participants.

University of Rochester — The Retrotransposon Hypothesis

A consortium led by Professor Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester received up to $22 million to test one of the most provocative ideas in geroscience: that aging is driven, in part, by DNA parasites called retrotransposons.

Here is the mechanism. As cells age, repetitive DNA sequences called LINE-1 elements — ancient viral remnants embedded in every human genome — escape their normal silencing and begin copying themselves. The cell's immune sensors detect these DNA fragments and interpret them as a viral invasion, triggering chronic inflammation. That inflammation — dubbed "inflammaging" — is now linked to cancer, neurodegeneration, diabetes, and autoimmune disease.

The team will test censavudine (TPN-101), an antiviral drug originally developed to treat HIV, in 200 healthy adults aged 60 to 65. Censavudine inhibits reverse transcriptase, the enzyme retrotransposons need to replicate. If suppressing retrotransposon activity reduces inflammaging, the trial will demonstrate both a novel drug target and a mechanistic explanation for why inflammation increases with age. Trial sites include the University of Rochester, UConn Health (led by Dr. George Kuchel), and the University of Texas Medical Branch, with Transposon Therapeutics providing the drug.

The 48-week treatment period will track mobility, cognition, vitality, molecular aging markers, and physical performance. Brown University's John Sedivy, who co-directs the project, was among the first researchers to identify retrotransposon activation as a driver of cellular senescence.

Stanford University — Building the Healthspan Score

Stanford's team is solving the measurement problem directly. Rather than testing a drug, they are harmonizing existing health datasets from multiple institutions to create what they call the PROSPR-IC score — a standardized healthspan metric that can be deployed across all PROSPR trials and, eventually, across aging research globally.

The team will validate this score in a one-year lifestyle intervention trial using in-home digital health assessment technology. If successful, the PROSPR-IC score becomes the common outcome measure that allows different aging interventions to be compared against each other — something the field currently lacks. Every drug trial in the PROSPR portfolio needs a reliable way to measure healthspan over one to three years. Stanford is building the ruler.

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health — Biomarker Discovery

Columbia's contribution is analytical rather than clinical. The team will conduct combined analysis of prior aging intervention trials to identify biomarkers that respond to treatment — the molecular signals that change when an intervention is actually working. This retrospective approach leverages decades of existing trial data to find the specific blood tests, imaging markers, and functional assessments that best predict long-term healthspan outcomes in shorter time frames.

The Three Biotech Teams

Three private-sector performers round out the PROSPR portfolio, each testing a different compound:

Cambrian BioPharma (New York) is evaluating a novel daily oral rapamycin analog — a next-generation version of rapamycin designed for better tolerability and more consistent dosing. Rapamycin's side effects at high doses (immunosuppression, metabolic disruption) have limited its use in aging research despite decades of animal data showing lifespan extension. A better-tolerated analog could change the risk-benefit calculation.

Apollo Alpha (St. Petersburg, FL) is testing an orally bioavailable compound targeting energy homeostasis, lipid metabolism, and inflammation — three pillars of metabolic aging. The specific compound has not been publicly disclosed.

Linnaeus Therapeutics (Haddonfield, NJ) is testing an established compound with demonstrated cardiometabolic benefits and once-daily dosing. Like Apollo Alpha, the specific drug identity remains under wraps, though the emphasis on an established safety profile suggests a repurposed medication rather than a novel molecule.

What Makes PROSPR Different

Three features distinguish PROSPR from conventional NIH-funded aging research.

Contract structure. ARPA-H awards are contracts with milestone-based payments, not grants with annual progress reports. Teams that miss milestones lose funding. Teams that exceed milestones can accelerate. This creates a pace of accountability that NIH study sections — which review grants every five years — cannot match.

Decentralized trial design. Multiple PROSPR teams are using in-home and community-based trial models rather than requiring participants to visit academic medical centers. This approach reduces dropout rates, improves demographic diversity, and enables larger enrollment at lower cost. The UT San Antonio team's use of a mobile clinical research clinic and wearable monitoring technology exemplifies this shift.

Parallel strategy. PROSPR is not choosing between drug candidates or between measurement approaches. It is funding all of them simultaneously, then using Stanford and Columbia's measurement work to compare results across teams. This is the venture capital approach to science funding: place multiple bets, accept that several will fail, and gain the most from the ones that succeed.

Who Should Pay Attention

PROSPR itself is fully awarded — these seven teams were selected, and new applications are not being accepted. But the program's implications for the aging research ecosystem extend well beyond the seven performers.

Academic geroscience labs should treat PROSPR's biomarker work as a roadmap for future proposals. If the PROSPR-IC score becomes the accepted healthspan outcome measure, future NIH and ARPA-H solicitations will require it. Labs that start incorporating these metrics into their current work will have a competitive advantage when the next round of healthspan funding opens.

Small biotech companies developing aging therapeutics should study the PROSPR contract structure. ARPA-H's milestone-based approach is likely to expand, and the agency has signaled interest in additional healthspan programs. Companies with repurposed FDA-approved drugs or compounds in Phase 2 trials are the most natural fit for ARPA-H's risk tolerance and timeline expectations.

NIH-funded researchers whose work intersects with aging biology — inflammation, metabolism, neurodegeneration, cardiovascular health — should note that ARPA-H and NIH are building complementary pathways. NIH's I-Corps program is actively training SBIR winners in commercialization strategy (Granted News), and researchers with PROSPR-adjacent findings may find faster translation routes through ARPA-H contracts than through traditional R01 renewals.

The Bigger Picture

The $144 million PROSPR investment arrives at a moment when the longevity field is flush with private capital — Saudi Arabia's Hevolution Foundation, Altos Labs, Calico, and dozens of venture-backed startups are collectively spending billions on aging research — but starved for the kind of rigorous, publicly funded clinical evidence that changes clinical practice and regulatory policy. Private funders optimize for proprietary advantage. ARPA-H optimizes for public data, open protocols, and regulatory precedent.

If PROSPR's trials demonstrate that rapamycin, semaglutide, or censavudine measurably slows biological aging in one to three years of treatment, the implications cascade across medicine. The FDA would have evidence to consider aging-related indications. Insurers would face pressure to cover preventive geroscience. And the next generation of aging researchers would have a validated toolkit — biomarkers, trial designs, outcome measures — that makes the field fundable at scale.

That is a lot of weight for seven teams and $144 million to carry. But ARPA-H's bet is that speed, accountability, and parallel execution can produce in five years what traditional academic funding would take twenty to deliver. For researchers and companies working at the intersection of aging biology and clinical medicine, Granted can help you track the emerging solicitations that PROSPR's results will inevitably generate.