The federal government is pledging up to $144 million to anti-aging research over the next five years through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a subject area previously named as priority by the program’s director.
The new initiative, called PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience or PROSPR, is awarding contracts to seven teams to fund research on extending “healthspan,” an increasingly popular buzzword that refers to healthy years of life. The overall goal of PROSPR is to power a new “healthspan industry,” according to a Feb. 24 release.
“PROSPR represents a tectonic shift in how we study healthy aging,” Alicia Jackson, Ph.D., director of ARPA-H, said in the release. “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.”
Jackson, who took over the Biden-era health innovation program last October, had previously told Fierce Biotech that anti-aging is an area of focus for her.
“If you can reverse biological age by one year across the nation, there are estimates [of] about $38 trillion in economic value [that] could be created through saved healthcare costs,” Jackson told Fierce in January.
The biopharma beneficiaries of PROSPR include Linnaeus Therapeutics, Cambrian BioPharma and Apollo Alpha.
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Linnaeus has landed up to $22 million for its lead candidate LNS8801, an oral activator of G protein-coupled estrogen receptor. The New Jersey biotech claims that LNS8801 has shown preclinical promise across cancer, cardiometabolic disease, inflammation and neurodegeneration, according to a Feb. 24 release. The candidate is currently being trialed in an open-label phase 1/2 study for multiple cancer types.
Linnaeus will use the funds for preclinical and clinical studies of LNS8801 in healthy older adults, according to the biotech’s release, with the goal of improving “intrinsic capacity,” a term describing a person’s combined physical and mental capabilities.
“LNS8801 has a mechanism of action expected to provide benefits in multiple organ systems,” Linnaeus CEO Patrick Mooney, M.D., said in the release. “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.”
With a name also inspired by the natural world, Cambrian Bio will net up to $30.8 million for its mTORC1 inhibitors, one of which is set to enter phase 1 studies. mTORC regulates key aspects of cellular metabolism, and it tends to go haywire as people get older, Cambrian said in a Feb. 24 release.
“The aging field has hotly debated mTORC inhibition because while existing drugs extend healthspan in animals, their low specificity comes with risks in humans,” Andrew Brack, Ph.D., ARPA-H program manager and PROSPR creator, said in Cambrian’s release. “That’s why we’re particularly excited to see the results of this new, specific mTORC1 inhibitor.”
As for Apollo Alpha, the Florida-based outfit is working on oral candidates meant to cross the blood-brain barrier to target “energy homeostasis, lipid metabolism and inflammation,” according to the ARPA-H release.
The other recipients of the PROSPR prize are Stanford University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of Rochester.
In addition to aging, ARPA-H’s Jackson told Fierce last month that she’s also keen to push forward on rare diseases, such as pediatric cancers. ARPA-H’s other recent funding efforts have supported in vivo CAR-T cell therapy, custom gene-editing therapies like the one that treated baby KJ and autonomous stroke-treating robots.
