Impetus Grants is designed to fund ambitious longevity science that would not happen otherwise. We prioritize speed, conviction, and leverage, so researchers can move fast on ideas that could reshape the field.
We provide up to $500k within 3 weeks for scientists to start working on the most important problems in aging biology. To date we have deployed $34M in the field
Impact
$34M+ deployed since 2021 with ~1% overhead
145 projects funded across three rounds
≤ 3 weeks from application to decision
200+ papers and preprints acknowledging Impetus support
>20% of grantees were new to aging research
The real measure of ambitious science funding is long-term field transformation. Our aim is to seed ideas that later define conferences, subfields, and translational pipelines. While that process takes time, traditional indicators of our impact are already strong, including publications in Science, Cell, Nature.
Examples of Funded Work
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CAR-T cells are immune cells engineered to hunt specific targets, now FDA-approved for leukemia and lymphoma. Impetus funded work repurposing them to eliminate "senescent" cells that accumulate with age and inflame surrounding tissue. Papers in Nature Aging (2024, 2025) showed single treatments reversed metabolic dysfunction and restored gut regeneration in old mice, with effects lasting months.
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Zhang et al. (Science 2025) created the most detailed cellular map of how individual cells change across tissues throughout a mouse's life, the atlas helps researchers distinguish changes that drive aging from downstream consequences.
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Rapamycin extends lifespan in animals more consistently than any other drug, but human data has been limited. Impetus funded several clinical trials, including ERAP (brain aging in early Alzheimer's patients) and VIBRANT (ovarian aging). Early VIBRANT results suggest meaningful slowing of ovarian reserve decline, with full results expected this year. A 1,000-woman follow-up trial is launching, which could establish a faster paradigm for testing potential aging therapeutics.
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Molecular measurements that estimate biological age from blood samples could, if properly validated, measure therapies’ effects in months rather than decades. Impetus-funded work is pushing towards that validation: Borrus et al. (2024-25) developed reliability standards and benchmarked existing clocks; Sehgal et al. created Systems Age, tracking 11 body systems in one measurement, and confirmed through meta-analysis that clocks respond to known longevity treatments.
Principles
Ambitious science
We fund work that could change the trajectory of aging research, not incremental additions to existing knowledge. Our review process is structured to surface bold ideas: individual reviewers can champion projects without requiring committee consensus, avoiding the dilution that often filters out unconventional approaches.
Leveraged impact
Impetus focuses on work that is too speculative for government funding and too early for company formation. Many of today’s most influential areas in longevity science, such as partial cellular reprogramming and epigenetic clocks, emerged without NIH support. We operate in that gap and bring exceptional scientists into aging who might not otherwise enter the field.
Efficient resourcing
Applications are short, decisions are made within three weeks, and organizational overhead has remained ~1.1%. This minimizes wasted time and maximizes the share of resources going directly to research.
Open Field Grants: Round 4
Impetus Grants
Round 4 will continue the success of our funding rounds to support and and expand the broader longevity research field.
Learning from past rounds, we are further streamlining our applications to identify the people and projects most likely to contribute to longevity.
We are targeting a round size of at least $5M.
Contact us to support Round 4.
Impetus Grants
Focused Grants: AI-Enabling Datasets
Computational intelligence is becoming abundant, but breakthroughs in medicine will only follow if we also have high quality data relevant to human disease. AlphaFold accelerated progress in protein folding thanks to strong ground truth data from crystallography. The equivalent data for curing disease is not molecular, but changes in the behavior of organs and organisms over time.
This focused round of Impetus Grants will ensure that we are generating the right data for the longevity field to benefit from advances in AI. Good inference will need to be trained on datasets that span both organ-level outcomes, and interventions or time course measurements that allow causal interactions to be identified and treatments to be proposed.
Why this matters
We have a lot of data on molecules and cells, but an organ is not a linear sum of its cells. Because we cannot even measure all the component molecules/cells at once, let alone their interactions and feedback loops, we cannot infer the causes or solutions to complex diseases from molecular or cellular data alone. So although we will increasingly automate and simulate experiments at the molecular and cellular level, extending this to new medicines will be limited by the time it takes to collect matching and hypothesis-testing data from organs and organisms.
We build datacenters now to meet anticipated compute demand. The same logic applies to data. If we want AI to move the needle on longevity therapies as early as possible, we should prioritize collecting the most obviously valuable datasets that cannot be accelerated.
Examples that would be worth funding include:
Adding high-dimensional measurements to intervention trials and other human longitudinal samples that have already been collected.
Large-scale perturbation experiments inside living organisms to map the responses of cells in the presence of interactions and feedback from a diseased organ.
Tools that allow us to measure more biology in commonly collected samples, e.g. blood draws, to make better use of ongoing human studies.
Setting up an adaptive human trial that could continuously test hypotheses from AI. Such designs have been used before, but take considerable time to set up.
Why this is a good fit for Impetus
Most research grants still assume that the next five years will be roughly like the last five, but given the pace of progress in AI that is unlikely to be the case. There’s a timely opportunity for grantmaking that understands both this development, and what the most important questions and required datasets in longevity are. We will combine reviewers in bio and AI, and require that resulting data is open-source and formatted for immediate ingestion by major AI model architectures.
Access the full print-friendly whitepaper here.
Impetus Grants
Focused Grants: Infectious Disease and Aging
Medicine has traditionally separated disease into two buckets: infectious diseases caused by pathogens, and chronic diseases driven by genetics, lifestyle, and aging. But a growing body of research suggests that infections can shift long-term disease risk, sometimes emerging years or decades after the initial infection appears “resolved.”
This focused round of Impetus Grants will target the interplay between infections and aging: where latent viruses, chronic bacterial exposures, and age-related immune activation are key drivers for an expanding set of neurological, cardiovascular, and cancerous conditions, and seem increasingly likely to be part of the underlying aging process.
Why this matters
If indeed chronic infections and reactivated viral biology contribute strongly to age-related disease, we could have a large blind spot in how we’re studying aging, but one that comes with treatment options for us to explore in the context of “normal” aging. For example:
Antivirals targeting persistent or latent viruses, including repurposed agents suitable for rapid translational testing
Vaccines preventing initial infection and downstream pathology, particularly where infection history can be quantified
Antimicrobials targeting chronic bacterial drivers, including oral pathogens implicated in long-term immune activation
Therapies that suppress age-linked innate immune activation triggered by viral-like signals from within our own cells
Beyond potential therapeutic benefit, establishing infection as a driver of chronic disease would create strong market pull for better antivirals and antimicrobials, at a time when resistance is steadily eroding existing tools.
Why this is a good fit for Impetus
This area has scientific foundations, but it often falls between funding categories: infectious disease programs prioritize acute infection and preparedness, while aging programs tend to prioritize downstream syndromes. Impetus can solve for this by combining infectious disease and longevity/aging to fund the important gaps. Based on field assessment, we expect 15+ fundable projects, supporting a minimum deployment of $5M.
Access the full print-friendly whitepaper here.