AFAR is pleased to announce that the FAST (Finding Aging biomarkers by Searching existing Trials) initiative, incubated and launched by AFAR, will advance as part of the recently launched federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s (ARPA-H) PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program.
Under the guidance of a Scientific Advisory Committee convened by AFAR, FAST began in 2022 to help catalyze and coordinate the development of biomarkers for aging. Biomarkers are measurable biological signals, often from blood, that can indicate how the body is aging and whether an intervention is having an effect. Unlike many disease areas, aging research has lacked widely accepted, validated biomarker endpoints, which forces studies to rely on slow clinical outcomes that can take years to observe.
FAST sought to boost the pace and quality of biomarker development for aging by bringing together investigators, trial resources, and philanthropic partners around an actionable approach: use existing clinical trials and stored samples to identify biomarkers that show measurable change within months and can serve as faster, more informative endpoints for clinical trials.
This first phase of FAST was led by AFAR Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research recipient Daniel W. Belsky, PhD(Columbia University); AFAR board member and multiple grantee Nir Barzilai, MD (Albert Einstein College of Medicine); and Mahdi Moqri, PhD(Brigham and Women's Hospital; Harvard Medical School). AFAR grantee and Cristofalo Award recipient Jamie Justice, PhD (XPRIZE Foundation; Wake Forest University), co-launched the initiative alongside Dr. Barzilai before Dr. Belsky assumed the leadership role.
Now, through ARPA-H’s PROSPR program, FAST will advance with Dr. Belsky as the core Principal Investigator, who will build on the scientific and operational foundation established during the phase of FAST that AFAR led for four years.
Validated biomarkers of aging could accelerate geroscience by enabling shorter, more informative studies and by improving comparability across trials and cohorts. Dr. Barzilai notes: “With better biomarkers, researchers can move from long, expensive studies to shorter, more informative trials, and more quickly learn which approaches produce measurable biological change in humans. This is an important step toward making aging research more rigorous, efficient, and actionable.”
AFAR congratulates the FAST team and looks forward to the advances that will be made through ARPA-H PROSPR.
Read a related press release here.
For more on the ARPA-H PROSPR program:
