ARPA-H Awards $144 Million to Seven Teams Racing to Prove FDA-Approved Drugs Can Extend Human Healthspan
The US government's health research agency has funded the first large-scale clinical trials testing whether rapamycin, semaglutide, and other repurposed drugs can slow biological aging in healthy adults, with results expected within three years.
Overview
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has awarded contracts worth up to $144 million across seven research teams tasked with running the first federally backed clinical trials designed to extend the number of years Americans live in good health. The program, called PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience, or PROSPR, funds four academic institutions and three biotech companies to identify early biomarkers of aging and test whether existing FDA-approved drugs can slow functional decline in healthy middle-aged adults.
The awards, announced in February 2026, mark the first time a US government agency has committed significant funding to human trials explicitly targeting biological aging rather than individual age-related diseases. PROSPR program manager Andrew Brack has structured the contracts around aggressive milestones, with teams expected to produce measurable healthspan outcomes within one to three years using decentralized, in-home trial designs rather than the decades-long studies that have traditionally stalled geroscience research.
The Drugs Under Trial
The largest single award, up to $38 million, went to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies will run a trial called VITAL-H, short for Validation and Intervention Testing for Aging, Longevity and Healthspan. Led by institute director Elena Volpi, the trial will evaluate three FDA-approved drugs in generally healthy adults aged 60 to 65: rapamycin, an immunosuppressant that has extended lifespan in multiple animal models; dapagliflozin, an SGLT2 inhibitor originally developed for diabetes; and semaglutide, the GLP-1 receptor agonist best known as the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. All three will be administered orally at low doses.
The VITAL-H trial introduces a framework called Intrinsic Capacity, which measures five domains of functional health: cognition, mobility, psychological function, vitality, and sensory capability. This composite endpoint is designed to capture the broad systemic decline associated with aging rather than any single disease outcome.
Targeting the Dark Genome
A separate PROSPR award of up to $22 million went to a consortium led by Brown University and the University of Rochester. Their trial will test censavudine, also known as TPN-101, an HIV drug that inhibits reverse transcriptase. The hypothesis, developed by Brown researcher John Sedivy and Rochester’s Vera Gorbunova, centers on retrotransposons — segments of repetitive DNA sometimes called the “dark genome” that become increasingly active with age.
As retrotransposons replicate, they release DNA fragments into the cytoplasm that the immune system mistakes for viral invaders, triggering chronic low-grade inflammation known as inflammaging. By blocking retrotransposon replication with censavudine, the researchers aim to quiet this false alarm at its source. The randomized trial will enroll at least 200 healthy adults aged 60 to 65 across three clinical sites over a 48-week treatment period, with the overall project spanning five years.
Building the Measurement Infrastructure
Two of the seven PROSPR teams are focused not on drug trials but on the measurement problem that has long hampered aging research: how to detect whether an intervention is working without waiting decades for disease or death. Stanford University will harmonize existing longitudinal health datasets from multiple institutions to generate a composite healthspan score, then validate it against a one-year lifestyle intervention.
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health will lead the FAST project, which mines data and biospecimens from previously completed clinical trials to discover biomarkers that reveal how drugs affect the biology of aging. Three biotech companies — Linnaeus Therapeutics, Cambrian BioPharma, and Apollo Alpha — round out the seven awardees, with Linnaeus receiving up to $22 million to advance LNS8801, an oral activator of the G protein-coupled estrogen receptor, into human healthspan trials.
What It Means
PROSPR represents a deliberate bet by the federal government that aging itself is a modifiable condition rather than an inevitable backdrop to disease. By repurposing drugs that already have established safety profiles, the program sidesteps the years-long preclinical pipeline that slows novel drug development. The decentralized trial designs, which rely on wearable technology and home-based monitoring, are intended to make large-scale enrollment feasible and reduce costs.
The program complements a parallel ARPA-H initiative called PATH, a $52 million project at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging that aims to predict chronic disease risk in healthy adults over 50, starting with Type 2 diabetes. Together, PROSPR and PATH signal that the US government is treating geroscience — the study of biological aging as a root cause of chronic disease — as a fundable, testable medical discipline rather than a speculative frontier.