NYC-Vita XPRIZE Healthspan Trial at Mount Sinai: Building the Blueprint for Healthy Aging
Our golden years are often marked by declining strength, fading memory, and increasing vulnerability to illness. Mount Sinai scientists have discovered that much of this decline may be driven by a shift in the immune system. A shift that may not be inevitable.
As immune cells age, some switch from protecting the body to damaging it. This shift drives inflammaging, a chronic inflammatory state that accelerates the loss of muscle function and cognitive ability while increasing the risk of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and other conditions.
By understanding this process and testing ways to reverse it, we hope to help more people remain healthier longer.
Our Approach
As NYC-Vita moves into the final phase of the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, our team will test whether a combination of three interventions—a drug, a nutritional supplement, and supervised exercise—can help prevent or reverse this immune shift.
Because immune aging affects the whole body, our team combines expertise in immunology, clinical trials, imaging, brain health, and exercise physiology to understand not only whether an intervention works, but how it works, who benefits most, and why.
Learn More About the Project
The NYC-Vita Healthspan Trial is an expanded version of a trial that has already been completed NCT07058974. The new trial is expected to open at the end of 2026. Once the study design has been finalized and the trial has received approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), we will provide additional information.
What We Hope to Learn
The XPRIZE Healthspan competition brings together leading international teams to accelerate the development of interventions that restore muscle, cognition, and immune function in adults ages 50 to 90 by a minimum of 10 years, with an ambitious goal of 20 years. Ultimately, we hope to help people live healthier for even longer. Beyond testing promising approaches, the competition aims to collaboratively establish better ways to measure healthspan and evaluate what truly works.
The study aims to better understand:
- Whether the interventions improve physical and cognitive function
- How the immune system changes during healthy aging
- Which biological markers best reflect improvements in healthspan
- Why some individuals respond differently than others
- How future healthspan trials can be designed more effectively
Our goal is not simply to test interventions. It is to help build the scientific framework that future healthspan medicine will rely on.
Meet the Leadership Team
Investigator: Miriam Merad, MD, PhD
Inflammaging
Investigator: Thomas Marron, MD, PhD
Clinical Trial Innovation
Investigator: Zahi Fayad, PhD
Muscle Function and Advanced Imaging
Investigator: Fanny Elahi, MD, PhD
Brain Health and Cognition
Investigator: Ryan W. Walker, PhD, MS
Cardiometabolic disease, exercise and nutrition
Looking Ahead
Imagine a future where more people can remain strong, sharp, and resilient throughout later life.
By helping us understand how the immune system influences healthy aging, the NYC-Vita trial aims to bring that future closer.
This project can help us meet one of the defining health care challenges of our time: ensuring that longer lives are also healthier ones.
