PROSPR and Biochronicity: full transcription

ARPA-H is funding seven research teams working to treat aging as a tractable biological process, and proving, in humans, that intervening earlier can help people stay healthier for longer. The initiative aims to use longitudinal human data to identify early, actionable biomarkers that respond before late-stage outcomes appear, serving as surrogate endpoints that can show, within one to three years, whether an intervention is plausibly shifting an individual's trajectory toward better function, resilience, and quality of life.

Short for Proactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience, PROSPR's goal is to overcome one of the key challenges that has limited clinical development in geroscience: aging is slow, and its associated diseases and conditions can take years or decades to emerge, making conventional trials unwieldy and expensive.

DARPA seeks to define the spatio-temporal instructive components encoded in cells in the context of their biological systems, through the application of advanced principles from evolutionary biology, genomics, mathematics, algorithm development, data mining, and the physical sciences. The focus of the program will be on unraveling biological clock systems in prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Should the research prove practicable, it could be used to put injured soldiers into effective suspended animation. It could also make it possible to put astronauts into hibernation before firing them at Mars or other planets, or even, perhaps, to offer hugely extended human lifespan.