February 24, 2026— Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has received an award as part of the PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program within the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to accelerate research on the biological hallmarks of aging. The project led by Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology, will help identify interventions that can extend healthy years of life in humans.
While life expectancy has increased dramatically, the number of years people spend in good health—has not kept pace. Chronic diseases now affect more Americans, particularly as they age, driving rising healthcare costs and reducing quality of life. The ARPA-H–funded project seeks to shift medicine from treating age-related disease after it appears to preventing decline before it begins.
“Current treatments focus on managing diseases after they emerge,” said Belsky, who is also affiliated with the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. “Our goal is to identify measurable biological signals that show when interventions are slowing the aging process itself—so we can preserve health, independence, and quality of life as people grow older.”
The award supports the five-year ARPA-H-funded PROSPR program, designed to transform geriatric medicine into a personalized, preventive model. Rather than launching new trials, the FAST project will analyze data and biospecimens from already-completed clinical trials to discover novel biomarkers that reveal how certain drugs affect the biology of aging.
Central to the effort is FAST, a large-scale initiative that integrates clinical and biological data from multiple trials testing drugs that modify fundamental aging processes and reduce the risk of multiple chronic diseases. To date, FAST, to be run out of Columbia, has incorporated trials involving four of five priority drug classes identified by the research team: metformin, SGLT-2 inhibitors, GLP-1 agonists, and rapamycin. These drugs target many of the core biological drivers of aging and have extended lifespan in animal models. Although originally approved for specific conditions they have shown broader benefits across multiple diseases in humans and will inform efforts by other PROSPR for future clinical trials.
Early findings underscore the promise of this approach. For example, preliminary results suggest rapamycin may slow ovarian aging by approximately 20 percent, potentially extending fertility by up to five years. Other trials show improvements in cardiovascular biomarkers, patient-reported health status, and reduced progression to diabetes.
"PROSPR was designed to allow the first clinical trials for aging to be possible," says Andrew Brack, ARPA-H Program Manager and creator of the PROSPR program. He adds, "To make clinical trials shorter than aging itself, we need biomarkers that change early in response to health-promoting interventions, which is why the FAST project is so important to the success of PROSPR as a whole.”
The project brings together experts from five institutions spanning aging biology, clinical trials, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenetics, biostatistics, and computational biology. Belsky serves as principal investigator, with co-leadership from Nir Barzilai, MD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Mahdi Moqri, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Zohn Rosen of Columbia Mailman School will serve as project manager.
“The FAST/ARPA‑H project will change how we measure and treat aging. Older adults will soon visit clinics, learn their biological age, receive targeted interventions, and see themselves getting younger within months,” said Barzilai. “At the same time, biotech innovators will gain a powerful way to tell early in trials whether their drugs work—speeding the creation of therapies that truly extend healthy life.”
All FAST data will be made available to qualified researchers through the Columbia Data Platform (CDP), a secure, cloud-based infrastructure operated by Redivis on Google Cloud, enabling broad collaboration and rapid discovery.
“This project is exciting because it moves the science of aging from theory to action,” said Belsky. “By combining data from multiple clinical trials, we have a rare opportunity to identify clear biological signals of what actually slows aging in humans—and to use that knowledge to prevent disease before it begins.”
Belsky adds: “FAST represents a turning point for aging research. Instead of asking whether individual drugs work for single diseases, we’re asking a much larger question: can we measure—and ultimately extend—the years people spend in good health? That shift has the potential to reshape medicine for an aging society.”
The FAST project now funded by the ARPA-H PROSPR Initiative was originally incubated by the American Federation for Aging Research and co-led by Dan Belsky, Nir Barzilai, and Mahdi Moqri. Current Columbia co-collaborators include Aris Floratos, Systems Biology; Yousin Suh, OBGYN; Zhonghua Liu, Biostatistics; and Gary Miller, Environmental Health Sciences. Outside collaborators are Svati Shah and Senthil Selvaraj, Duke University; Andrew Sauer, Saint Luke's Health System; Nir Barzilai, Einstein College of Medicine; Mahdi Moqri, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Henrik Bengtsson, NovoNordisk; the proteomics company OLink, and the epigenetics company TruDiagnostic.
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.mailman.columbia.edu.
The Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Bringing together the campus-wide resources of a top-tier research university, the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center’s approach to aging science is an innovative, multidisciplinary one with an eye to practical and policy implications. Its mission is to add to the knowledge base needed to better understand the biosocial processes of aging and the societal implications of increased longevity. For more information about this university-wide center based at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, please visit: aging.columbia.edu.
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