ARPA-H bets big to foster drugs that thwart aging

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Source: Science Magazine

Original: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aeh1092?af=R...

Published: 2026-03-12T06:00:03Z

ARPA-H is investing up to $144 million in the PROSPR program to develop antiaging drugs and extend healthy lives.[6][7] The program includes several projects, including testing TPN-101 (Censavudine), a drug originally developed to treat HIV, which suppresses retrotransposon activity and chronic inflammation caused by DNA.[1][3][5] This project is led by the University of Rochester with partners such as Brown University, UConn, UTMB and others, with funding of up to $22 million.[3][5] It includes long-term preclinical studies in mice and a randomized clinical trial with 200 healthy adults aged 60-65, lasting 48 weeks, evaluating mobility, cognition, vitality and other WHO parameters.[3][4] Another FAST project at Columbia University is analyzing data from existing trials of drugs such as metformin, SGLT-2 inhibitors, GLP-1 agonists and rapamycin to discover biomarkers of aging.[2][7] Preliminary findings show that rapamycin can slow ovarian aging by 20% and extend fertility by 5 years.[2] The goal is to validate aging biomarkers for faster clinical trials without long-term follow-up.[7]