AFAR News: Amplifying Geroscience Initiative impact at close of Federal FY2024

AFAR’s Amplifying Geroscience Initiative aims to educate policymakers about the broad and potentially transformative benefits of geroscience on older citizens’ health and our nation’s economy.

We are pleased to share updates of the impact of our efforts at the close of the 2024 federal fiscal year.

• Thanks in part to our advocacy, the Department of Defense’s Peer-Reviewed Medical Research Program (PRMRP) will include geroscience in the list of research areas for the first time. In the fiscal year 2024 appropriations bill for defense, Congress provided $370 million for PRMRP and added “accelerated aging processes associated with military service” to the PRMRP.
  

• AFAR succeeded in securing congressional report language in the FY 2024 appropriations bill for NIH that encourages the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to prioritize support for early career investigators in geroscience.
  

• In the FY 2024 appropriations bill, AFAR also helped secure the inclusion of key report language for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a recently created federal agency modeled on DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), to prioritize two geroscience research areas that align with the mission of ARPA-H.

Learn more about the Amplifying Geroscience Initiative’s efforts since 2022 here.