Dog Aging Project

The Dog Aging Project is a long-term study of aging in companion dogs, anchored at the University of Washington and Texas A&M University, that has enrolled more than 50,000 pet dogs since opening in late 2019.¹ It pairs an open-data longitudinal cohort with TRIAD, a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial testing whether Rapamycin extends lifespan and Healthspan in normally aging dogs — which its investigators describe as the first rigorous lifespan trial of a drug against aging conducted outside the laboratory in any species.²

§Overview

The project occupies a deliberate middle position in the geroscience pipeline. Rapamycin's lifespan record was built in mice, most rigorously by the Interventions Testing Program, but inbred laboratory mice live in cages, eat one diet, and die of a narrow set of diseases. Human trials with survival endpoints would take decades. Companion dogs sit between the two: genetically diverse animals that share their owners' homes, air, water, and habits, receive medical care with diagnostics resembling human medicine, and compress an aging trajectory into ten to fifteen years.³

The consortium was founded by biogerontologists Daniel Promislow and Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington with veterinarian Kate Creevy, now chief veterinary officer at Texas A&M.¹ It is an academic, largely federally funded effort, distinct from the commercial canine-longevity company Loyal — a distinction press coverage frequently blurs.

§History

The project grew out of mid-2010s work at the University of Washington on mTOR inhibition and aging, and a 2016 paper by Kaeberlein, Creevy, and Promislow set out the two-arm design: a large observational cohort plus an intervention trial in pet dogs.² A ten-week pilot published in 2017 established feasibility.⁴ A five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging followed in 2018, and when nationwide enrollment opened in November 2019, owner nominations exceeded the initial target within days.⁵

1. c. 2014
   Project conceived
   Promislow and Kaeberlein begin planning a national study of aging in companion dogs at the University of Washington, initially on university seed money.
2. 2016
   Design published
   Kaeberlein, Creevy, and Promislow lay out the cohort-plus-trial design in Mammalian Genome, framing companion dogs as a translational model for geroscience.
3. 2017
   Rapamycin pilot
   A ten-week randomized pilot in 24 middle-aged dogs reports no serious side effects and improved echocardiographic measures.
4. 2018
   NIA grant
   The National Institute on Aging awards five-year funding, ultimately roughly $29 million in federal support.
5. 2019
   Open enrollment
   Nationwide enrollment launches in November; owner nominations surge past the initial 10,000-dog goal within a week.
6. 2022
   Nature paper
   Creevy et al. describe the open-science cohort design in Nature, with tens of thousands of dogs already enrolled.
7. 2023
   Renewal declined
   The NIA declines to renew the project's core grant, a decision reported by Science in late 2023 and protested by researchers and dog owners.
8. 2024
   Nonprofit spin-out
   With federal funding expiring in June, the founders establish the Dog Aging Institute, a 501(c)(3), and set out to raise $40–50 million.
9. 2025
   TRIAD expanded
   A $7 million NIH grant to Texas A&M expands the rapamycin trial from about 170 dogs toward a target of 580 across multiple sites, scheduled to run to late 2029.

§The case for dogs

The scientific argument rests on what laboratory animals cannot provide. Pet dogs are exposed to the same environmental variation as their owners — diet, exercise, pollution, household chemistry — so findings about how environment shapes aging have a plausibility that cage studies lack. They develop the same age-related diseases that dominate human medicine: cancer, kidney disease, cognitive decline, and the functional losses that mark most of the Hallmarks of aging operate in dogs much as in people. And veterinary medicine supplies real clinical endpoints — diagnoses, treatments, and dates of death — rather than proxies.³

The compressed timescale

A large dog reaches old age in about a decade, so a lifespan trial that would take forty years in humans reports in five. That compression, not sentiment, is why geroscience keeps returning to dogs as the bridge between mouse data and human trials.

Dog size adds a natural experiment: large breeds age faster and die younger than small ones, one of the strongest known links between growth signaling and lifespan in mammals, and a pattern the cohort is positioned to dissect.³

§Research programme

Enrolled dogs — the project calls the cohort the Pack — are followed through annual owner surveys covering health, diet, activity, environment, and behavior, linked where possible to veterinary records. Nested sub-cohorts contribute biological samples to a biobank that held over 14,000 specimens by early 2024, with genomic sequencing for a subset, and the project has reported roughly 50 papers from the data.⁶ Outputs range from epidemiology of canine cognitive dysfunction to methylation-based epigenetic clocks for dogs, part of a wider effort to give Biological age measures a species in which they can be validated against actual lifespan on a usable timescale — a test most human Aging biomarkers have never faced.

The cohort is explicitly open science: curated, de-identified data are released for any researcher to analyze, a commitment stated in the project's founding papers and its 2022 Nature description.³

§The TRIAD trial

TRIAD — the Test of Rapamycin In Aging Dogs — is a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in healthy dogs at least seven years old and over 44 pounds, the large-dog population whose remaining lifespan is short enough for a survival endpoint to be readable. Dogs receive oral rapamycin or placebo for one year and are followed for roughly two more, with lifespan as the primary endpoint and cardiac function, cognition, and mobility among the secondary measures.⁷ A 2025 grant expanded enrollment from about 170 dogs toward a target of 580, with principal investigators at Texas A&M, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin, and completion scheduled for late 2029.¹

The trial's foundation is thin but real: the 2017 pilot found ten weeks of rapamycin well tolerated in 24 middle-aged dogs, with improved echocardiographic measures as secondary findings.⁴ Rapamycin's mechanistic case — mTOR inhibition, enhanced Autophagy, overlap with Caloric restriction — comes from the same mouse literature that motivates human interest in the drug.

A positive result would still not be human evidence

If TRIAD reports longer-lived treated dogs, it will be the strongest lifespan result for any drug outside the laboratory — in a species with its own metabolism, diseases, and dosing window. No rapamycin trial in humans has tested survival or healthspan, and a canine result cannot substitute for one.

§Funding

The project ran on roughly $29 million of NIA support from 2018, covering about 90% of its budget. In late 2023 the institute declined to renew the grant, a decision first reported by Science;⁸ Kaeberlein publicly called it "clearly the wrong decision," and more than 13,000 supporters petitioned for restoration.⁶ With federal funding expiring in June 2024, the founders created the Dog Aging Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to raise $40–50 million and carry the cohort forward on philanthropy.⁶ The rescue that materialized was partial and targeted: the 2025 NIH award funds TRIAD's expansion specifically, while the longitudinal cohort continues on a leaner mix of donations and institutional support.¹

§Outlook

TRIAD is the nearest thing geroscience has to a scheduled verdict. A clear result in either direction, expected around the end of the decade, will land directly on the human debate: proponents argue that a canine lifespan effect would justify human trials of rapamycin against aging in a way mouse data never could, much as Nir Barzilai's proposed TAME trial seeks to do for Metformin and the TAME trial. A null result in a genetically diverse, free-living species would be equally informative, and harder to explain away than a failed mouse cohort.

The harder question is institutional. The funding crisis showed that a decades-long cohort — the kind of infrastructure behind human epidemiology's Framingham — sits poorly in five-year grant cycles, and the project's survival now depends on philanthropy holding until results arrive. Its founders' own framing invites a further tension: a study justified partly by the healthspan of dogs themselves, and partly as a stepping stone to human medicine, will eventually have to say which claim its data actually support.

§See also

• Rapamycin
• Interventions Testing Program
• Loyal
• Geroscience hypothesis
• Metformin and the TAME trial
• Healthspan

§References