How do we turn the science of aging into trustworthy, deployable systems that improve human lives at meaningful scale?

Life sciences innovation increasingly sits at the intersection of AI, health data, and ethics. 

Nathan Price, a member of the Board on Life Sciences at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging is helping lead this kind of work through Healthspan Horizons – an initiative using AI and health science data to advance healthy aging while safeguarding privacy and ethics.

The initiative’s mission is anchored in the belief that the future of healthspan—the years of life in good health—will not be defined by any single dataset, institution, or technology, but instead by how effectively scientific knowledge is organized, governed, and used in health care settings. However, mobilizing shared AI infrastructure to better understand, measure, and extend quality of life is a complex effort. It requires bridging the gap in how longevity science is organized, as well as the interoperability of diverse sets of data across different health care providers.

Data sets around aging and disease risk can be challenging to navigate. Price’s research into real world data infrastructure systems brings together deep, long-term health data and mobilizes rigorous AI to better understand variables that contribute to healthy aging to inform the initiative’s overall trajectory and scope. With a robust application of these data sets and AI, Healthspan Horizons will work toward its objective to better understand how numerous variables contribute toward an individual’s years of energy, strength, and independence.

Price also contributes this knowledge and experience to the cross-disciplinary opportunities in the life sciences, biotechnology, and other programmatic areas of the National Academies that emphasize innovation in molecular- to ecosystem- level research and the design and engineering of biological systems that can impact public health, agriculture, and beyond.   

Read more about the initiative.

Read more about the Board on Life Sciences.

Read more about the Life Sciences and Biotechnology Program Area.