The Big Bet

An ASU group, “ASU Team Healthspan,” is competing in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition—described in the source as the largest XPRIZE ever, with 774 teams registered and a $101 million cash prize for the winner. The team was formed specifically for this challenge by Judith Klein-Seetharaman, a professor in ASU’s College of Health Solutions.

The competition’s headline goal is blunt and audacious. Klein-Seetharaman puts it this way:

“buy 20 years”
with an intervention timeframe of one year

That framing matters. This isn’t about incremental improvements over decades; it’s about measurable healthspan impact on a tight clock—exactly the kind of constraint that forces teams to pick interventions that could plausibly move the needle quickly.

The Showstopper

The team’s centerpiece is a hyperbaric chamber installed in late January—described as their “showstopper”—that allows trained professionals to control the amount of oxygen a patient receives.

Klein-Seetharaman compares the oxygen manipulation to altitude exposure:

like climbing Mount Everest
because oxygen concentration can gradually increase or decrease to simulate elevation change.

Her rationale is a hormesis-style argument: changing oxygen levels is supposed to force the body to adapt acutely and “build resilience over time.” In longevity circles, that idea rhymes with broader “stress-and-recover” frameworks—if the stress dose is appropriate and the recovery is real.

Hyperbaric vs Hypobaric

A particularly interesting wrinkle here is that ASU’s system isn’t positioned as only hyperbaric. According to ASU biochemistry senior Sarah Calcaterra, the chamber is:

not only hyperbaric but also hypobaric

Calcaterra says the team is researching the effects of both conditions in the same trial, which she characterizes as new compared with studying them separately.

She also gives a concrete description of what the exposures involve:

• Hyperbaric conditions: 100% oxygen delivered via a face mask, with pressure changes intended to force more oxygen into the blood
• Hypobaric conditions: the “opposite,” producing oxygen deficiency

Subjectively, Calcaterra describes the experience as familiar to anyone who flies:

like being on an airplane with ears popping
and like going “10,000 feet in the air without moving.”

Stacked Interventions

The oxygen chamber isn’t the only lever they’re pulling. The team is also working with a menu of what the source calls “anti-aging practices,” including:

• Red light therapy
• Hydrogen gas therapy
• Saunas
• Ice baths
• Exercise and recovery practices

That combination reflects a practical reality in healthspan research: many single interventions have modest effects, while programs often aim for systems-level change (metabolism, inflammation, physical function) via multiple inputs. Klein-Seetharaman emphasizes metabolic health as central to preventing age-related disease and describes the project as an attempt to decrease biological age—even offering a vivid target state:

chronologically 90 but biologically 70

She defines healthspan as the period in which someone can function “without health complications.”

Mechanism Hunting

Beyond the chamber and lifestyle-style tools, the team is also doing computational biology. The source reports that they use a supercomputer to run models predicting potential target sites for molecules in the body—essentially to prioritize what to test.

Klein-Seetharaman links this to a broader inflection point in biomedicine:

advances in protein structure prediction create unprecedented opportunities
to predict possible targets that a molecule can bind to.

In other words: rather than testing blindly, they’re trying to use modern structure prediction and modeling to narrow the search space—an approach that could speed iteration when the intervention window is only a year.

What You Can Do

This isn’t a DIY protocol—especially not the chamber component, which is explicitly described as professionally controlled oxygen delivery. Still, there are actionable meta-lessons from how the team is thinking:

• Prioritize metabolic health: the project centers it as foundational for age-related disease prevention.
• Treat recovery like a variable: the source highlights exercise and recovery practices as part of the clinical work with participants.
• Be skeptical of speed claims: “buy 20 years” is a competition goal, not a reported outcome.

If you’re experimenting with any intervention stack (heat, cold, light, gases, training), the longevity-relevant habit is not just doing more—it’s tracking response, recovery, and function over time.

The Caveats

The source provides no clinical trial design details—no sample size, duration specifics, randomization, endpoints, or quantitative results. That means you should read this as a report on a competition-driven research effort and its rationale, not evidence that the protocol works.

It’s also a reminder of a core rule in longevity journalism: mechanisms and anecdotes are not outcomes. The chamber may be a compelling tool; the question is whether this program can produce measurable, validated changes in healthspan within the XPRIZE’s one-year window.

The Bottom Line

ASU Team Healthspan is taking an aggressive, competition-shaped run at aging: oxygen modulation (hyperbaric and hypobaric), paired with a broader slate of interventions and a computational strategy for prioritizing molecular targets. The ambition—“buy 20 years”—is enormous. What will matter next is not the novelty of the chamber, but the rigor and transparency of the outcomes it produces.

Source: ASU scientists compete in XPRIZE competition, hope to increase life longevity — The Arizona State Press