The Buck Institute on Aging today announced the launch of Healthspan Horizons. This is a new initiative designed to address one of modern medicine’s most pressing challenges: how to measure, understand, and extend healthy lifespan (years of healthy life).
People are living longer, but too much of that extra life is spent managing chronic diseases. In other words, healthy life expectancy (the number of years of healthy life lived) is not keeping up. Growing evidence suggests that many aspects of healthy aging are modifiable, with consequential implications for people, health systems, and economies. What is missing is the infrastructure to consistently measure it, responsibly calculate it, and collectively act on it.
What Healthspan Horizons is building
Healthspan Horizons is building a new kind of healthspan research infrastructure. It’s a platform that links multimodal, real-world data from people’s everyday interactions with trusted wellness partners like wearables, sleep, activity, nutrition, labs, and more, with regular in-depth discovery measurements led by Buck. The goal is to create unique, powerful, long-term datasets that reveal the real drivers of human healthspan over time, and use responsible AI and the science of aging to turn those signals into interpretable healthspan trajectories and early signals for disease prevention.
Dense longitudinal datasets are important because their values are complex. When many different signals are measured about the same person over time, the data becomes exponentially more informative. This density makes it possible to detect subtle patterns, understand resilience, and identify early deviations from healthy aging long before sudden, life-ending or life-debilitating diseases develop.
Healthspan Horizons supports participation through partner programs and Buck-led research, enabling individuals, wellness companies, and health systems to contribute longitudinal data with clear permissions and ethical governance. In return, participants gain access to a shared discovery engine. This is the kind of insight that only comes when diverse data streams are responsibly linked over time, and can help validate what works, identify early signs of decline, and benchmark outcomes across populations. Over time, the platform aims to translate these findings into clearer guidance on what helps people stay resilient and maintain energy, strength and independence for longer.
When used responsibly, AI, grounded in the deep biology of aging, can integrate complex, multimodal signals into interpretable healthspan trajectories, unlocking more years of energy, function, and independence. But that future is only possible if we can responsibly connect the right types of data at scale. Healthspan Horizons exists to enable that integration and democratize the benefits of Healthspan science to everyone.
Federated privacy protection model
The Buck Institute’s Healthspan Horizons addresses this gap by reimagining how healthspan science is organized. Rather than forcing data into a single silo, Healthspan Horizons enables partners to collaborate and learn together while keeping data management in place. Through a federated privacy-preserving approach, authorized analytics can be performed across partner environments without requiring ownership or commodification of personal health data.
The science of aging has matured to the point where extending healthy lifespans is within reach. What we need now is an infrastructure to organize and responsibly apply that knowledge. Healthspan Horizons helps lead Buck to the next chapter in Healthspan that is measurable, reliable, and accessible to all. ”
Eric Burdin, President and CEO, Buck Institute on Aging
“Most of us don’t just want to live longer, we want more energy, strength and independence,” said Dr. Nathan Price, professor at the Buck Institute on Aging. Co-founder of Healthspan Horizons. “What’s missing is a way to integrate detailed longitudinal health data and apply rigorous AI to understand what truly drives healthy aging responsibly, interoperably, and at scale. Healthspan Horizons is built to make that possible.”
A platform for collective health span intelligence
Healthspan Horizons is designed as an open, federated platform that links deep biological data, long-term outcomes, and real-world context. By reconciling a fragmented data ecosystem through shared standards, interpretable intelligence, and ethical governance, this effort creates the conditions for the health period to become a practical and trusted unit of value across research, care delivery, and policy.
The platform invites you to participate, not just as users, but as co-builders of the Healthspan Commons.
- Researchers are invited to contribute methods, validation, and discoveries to a shared framework that expands the scope, reuse, and real-world relevance of existing science while maintaining data privacy and agreed data sovereignty.
- Clinicians and health systems can work together to transform complex data into interpretable health span trajectories that support prevention, early intervention, and functional longevity.
- Payers and employers can explore new value models based on years of work earned rather than episodic usage.
- Individuals are invited to participate as informed partners, maintaining ownership over their data while benefiting from insights designed to support longer, healthier lives.
- Donors and public partners are encouraged to support shared infrastructure that focuses on healthy life expectancy as a public good.
Healthspan Horizons is focused on defining and validating shared healthspan measurements, transforming multimodal longitudinal data into computable trajectories and early warning signals that partners can use for research and prevention.
Why Back, Why Now?
Healthspan Horizons is powered by Buck Institute scientists and systems thinkers with decades of experience at the intersection of aging biology, data science, and translational research.
The initiative, led by Dr. Nathan Price and Dr. E. Shelly Chan, will launch with the involvement of leaders in the research, healthcare, philanthropy, and innovation ecosystems, including advisory groups across academic medicine, systems biology, precision health, and public health. Advisors include Dr. Larry Brilliant, a global public health leader and co-founder and CEO of Evity; Dr. Joel Dudley, biomedical AI entrepreneur, co-founder and CSO of Bevimi, and former chief scientific officer of Tempus. Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, a leading clinician and researcher promoting epigenetics and lifestyle medicine. Lee Hood, MD, PhD, systems biology pioneer and CEO of Phenome Health. Shaista Malik, MD, MPH, vice president for integrative medicine at the University of California, Irvine, is a cardiologist specializing in preventive cardiology. Dr. Sara Zall, a functional medicine physician and New York Times bestselling author, focuses on precision longevity. Eric Burdin, MD, president and CEO of the Buck Institute and an internationally recognized leader in geriatrics;
“Medicine is moving from being reactive and episodic to being predictive and preventative,” said Lee Hood, MD, a systems biology pioneer and CEO of Phenom Health. “Achieving that transformation requires moving beyond fragmented data silos to shared, unified intelligence. Healthspan Horizons helps build the computational and ethical foundations needed to make healthspan measurable and actionable.”
A common approach to the future of healthy life expectancy
The future of healthy life expectancy will not be defined by a single data set, institution, or technology. It is shaped by how effectively a society chooses to organize, govern, and apply scientific knowledge.
Healthspan Horizons exists to enable that future by making healthy life expectancy calculable, reliable, and accessible, while being grounded in human dignity and collective good.
Full Healthspan Horizons White Paper, Bridging Wellness and Clinical Science: A Federal Health Period Data Framework for a 21st Century Longevity Economywhich outlines the scientific, technical, and governance foundations of this effort, is available at healthspanhorizons.org/whitepaper. Researchers, clinicians, organizations and individuals interested in participating can learn more at healthspanhorizons.org/join.
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Buck Aging Research Institute
