Dynamic Resilience $60M program

Wellcome Leap and Temasek Trust have partnered to launch a US$60 million (~S$80 million) Dynamic Resilience programme aimed at increasing health spans. Average human life expectancy has doubled from 35 to 70 years over the past century, but health spans have not correspondingly improved. Data shows that worldwide, more than 1 in 2 adults aged over 60 have multimorbidity, or multiple co-existing health issues. This and decreasing dynamic resilience - the ability to respond to and cope with stress - contribute to clinical frailty which makes us vulnerable to sudden and serious health deterioration in the event of acute illness or injury.

Multimorbidity poses an urgent challenge for health services and this is set to increase in the coming decades. Frailty affects up to half of adults over 65 globally, and people who have experienced traumatic injury, cancer treatment, or menopause. Frailty reduces our ability to live independently and increases the likelihood of falls, hospitalization, the need for long-term care, and death. The negative impact of frailty and age-related ill health on patients, their families, caregivers, and societies, is unsustainable.

The Dynamic Resilience programme aims to reduce frailty progression by 25% which could prevent 71,000 hospitalizations and 8,000 deaths annually from falls in the US alone and benefit 87 million older adults globally.

The three program goals are:

1. Discover and integrate markers of human dynamic resilience that identify individuals prior to a stress event (SE) with prediction accuracy of >85% sensitivity and >90% specificity for clinical outcomes post-SE (e.g., return to health, frailty progression, loss of independence, death).
2. Develop multi-scale models that link the biomarkers predictive of loss of steady state and dynamic resilience to mechanism. It will be necessary to show that identified mechanisms (some of which may overlap with known hallmarks of ageing) either promote and maintain homeostasis, or are causative of resilience loss. Such models and demonstration of mechanism can be at the cellular, tissue, system, or whole-body scale.
3. Validate the clinical and developmental utility of measures, models, and candidate preventative interventions to promote resilience in at-risk populations by undertaking specific, targeted trials. Of particular interest are trials involving preventative interventions in older adults prior to predictable stress events such as elective laparoscopic or orthopaedic surgery, or cancer therapy and that focus both on demonstrating pre-stressor predictive clinical outcome accuracy of >85% sensitivity and >90% specificity with respect to frailty progression and interventions that seek at least a 25% reduction in the number of patients showing frailty progression following the stress event.

Full information on the call can be found here