A Stanford University-led coalition secured a $34.5M award to develop the first US Food and Drug Administration-grade "intrinsic capacity” (IC) score.

With age, people often experience a gradual decline in IC, the combined physical and mental abilities that support independence and health. The World Health Organization recognizes IC as a central indicator of resilience in aging, yet no affordable, validated tool exists to measure it. Current healthcare approaches focus on individual diseases or rely on costly private programs, and clinical trials remain slow because there is no reliable proxy for age-related functional decline.

The university's THRIVE team, in collaboration with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the Methuselah Foundation, and other partners bought together experts in longevity science to address this gap, backed by an award of up to $34.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) PROSPR program (PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience).

The coalition will develop a PROSPR IC score that predicts 20-year outcomes including mortality, multimorbidity, hospitalization, and loss of functional ability. The score will integrate health surveys, functional assessments, continuous wearable data, and blood-based biomarkers across large longitudinal datasets, spanning millions of data points, to generate a robust predictor of future health trajectory up to 20 years ahead. Researchers will translate this score into a streamlined at-home assessment kit.

“With PROSPR, we're enabling the first-ever clinical trials that truly target aging," said Andrew Brack, ARPA-H Program Manager and creator of the PROSPR program. "To avoid decades-long studies, we must identify a short-term, reliable and intervenable surrogate that predicts longer-term changes in health, and that's why THRIVE is an essential key to the program's success."

To validate the PROSPR IC score, the THRIVE team will conduct a series of 1,000+ person decentralized observational and lifestyle intervention trials in partnership with the YMCA, using OpenCures as the underlying clinical trial platform.

The trials will involve a diverse US population to determine whether improvements in diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and social engagement measurably improve intrinsic capacity. This approach could shift healthcare from reacting to disease toward preserving function and resilience before decline occurs, the researchers say.

Stanford is one of 7 teams that received grants to study age-related illnesses and solutions. To learn more about the grantees, click here