Making healthy aging possible

What if aging wasn’t something we merely endured, but something we could actively shape?

The $101M XPRIZE Healthspan competition invites health experts to do just that by challenging competing teams to create innovative therapies that restore muscle, cognitive and immune function by a minimum of 10 years, with a goal of 20, to make healthy aging possible for everyone.

This is the goal of the Arizona State University Healthspan team, led by Professor Judith Klein-Seetharaman of the School of Molecular Sciences and the College of Health Solutions as well as the Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery. The team is one of only 100 qualified teams — out of 765 — from around the world selected as semifinalists. 

At the heart of the competition lies a demanding clinical trial still looming on the horizon: 200 participants, one full year of daily intervention, hours of commitment and exhaustive health assessments, followed by years of analysis. The final intervention trial will begin at the end of 2026 and stretch nearly three years beyond that.

But before any of this can happen, the teams must prove the promise of their respective approaches through the outcome of an eight-week clinical trial with 20 participants by April 13. Only then can they advance into the top ten teams worldwide.

The reward isn’t just prestige or a $1 million award to fund participation. It is access to something nearly priceless: comprehensive multiomics profiling, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and immune cell characterization.

The team’s intervention consists of four elements, the first of which is promoting a healthy lifestyle that takes into account supplements and food choices. This component combines mechanistic insights derived from decades of experience with lifestyle changes from the lab of Professor Susan Racette of the College of Health Solutions, with key innovations from the Klein-Seetharaman lab.

Using ASU’s high-performance computing resources, the team — which also includes research professors Susanta Sarkar and Sampath Rangasamy — has modeled biological targets of supplements at scale, predicting synergies rather than guessing at them.

The second component, oxygen, involves Joseph Dituri — a retired Navy commander, an associate professor at the University of South Florida, and now a core member of the ASU Healthspan team.

Dituri once spent 100 days living in a small vessel beneath the waters of Key Largo. He understands pressure, oxygen and the human body’s response to extremes in ways few people on Earth do. He helped install a one-of-a-kind, custom-built multibaric chamber for the team — capable of simulating conditions from the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the ocean, cycling oxygen concentration and pressure with precision. The team’s protocol will involve 15 minutes of hypoxia mimicking high altitudes, followed by one hour of hyperbaric oxygen daily.

The third component, "smart fit" exercise, replaces endless hours at the gym with AI-driven, adaptive resistance training, designed to maximize functional gains in minimal time while accounting for recovery and individual variability.

Behind the scenes, Clinton Hughes of Youth Renewal Sciences helped make the science possible by providing space, infrastructure and connections to innovators across the anti-aging industry. Zero State was also a collaborator, offering solutions by applying quantum computing and its work with “food vectors” — patterns of nutrients predicted to counteract molecular damage to proteins. Additionally, Theriome, a startup company founded by ASU alumnus Paniz Jasbi, provided digital twin-based personalized recommendations on supplementation based on metabolomics data input.

Together, the team is working toward Investigational New Drug approvals to safely integrate new components before the final trial.

The XPRIZE is not a traditional granting agency. There are no familiar mechanisms, no predictable pipelines. The effort is sustained through creativity, in-kind support, and the sheer commitment of partners like Hughes and Dituri.

The April 13 application will be submitted through the College of Health Solutions as a grant application — the closest proxy available for something that doesn’t quite fit any existing category.

This isn’t just a competition. It is a proof of concept — for science, for collaboration, for a future in which aging itself might finally become something we can engage with intelligently, deliberately and humanely.