ARPA-H Designates $144M for Seven Teams Racing to Slow Human Aging

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has selected seven research teams to tackle one of medicine's most ambitious questions: can we slow biological aging with existing drugs? The answer could reshape how millions of Americans experience their final decades — and ARPA-H is putting $144 million behind finding out.

Seven Teams, Five Years, Milestone-Based Contracts

The PROSPR program (PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience) is structured around performance-based contracts rather than traditional grants, meaning teams must hit aggressive research milestones to keep their funding. Each team attacks aging through a different biological pathway.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is running a Phase 3 hybrid trial repurposing three FDA-approved drugs already familiar to clinicians: an SGLT2 inhibitor, rapamycin, and semaglutide. Stanford is building a healthspan scoring system using in-home digital health technology. And the University of Rochester, in collaboration with Brown University, UConn, and UT Medical Branch, is testing Censavudine — originally developed for HIV — on the theory that suppressing virus-like DNA sequences called retrotransposons could reduce the chronic inflammation that accelerates aging. That trial alone will enroll at least 200 participants ages 60–65 across three clinical sites.

The Biotech Contingent

Three private companies round out the cohort. Cambrian BioPharma is evaluating a novel rapamycin analog. Linnaeus Therapeutics is testing a once-daily compound with established cardiometabolic benefits. Apollo Alpha is pursuing an oral candidate targeting energy homeostasis, lipid metabolism, and inflammation.

What Researchers Should Watch For

PROSPR compresses what would normally be decades of clinical trial timelines into one to three years — a deliberate design choice by ARPA-H to accelerate translational results. The milestone-based contracts create a fundamentally different incentive structure than NIH R01 grants, prioritizing speed and clinical relevance over publication output.

For investigators in gerontology, biomarker development, or clinical trial design, the PROSPR teams will need collaborators as they scale enrollment. Tools like Granted can help researchers identify complementary federal and foundation funding to build on this momentum. In-depth analysis of ARPA-H's funding strategy is available on the Granted blog.