Engineering the chamber behind ASU’s XPRIZE Healthspan bid

By Tolga Kabak
Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, HPO.TECH

The Arizona State University Healthspan team is one of 100 semifinalists in the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition, selected from 765 entries worldwide. The competition asks teams to develop interventions that restore muscle, cognitive and immune function by at least 10 years, with a stretch goal of 20. To advance, semifinalists must complete an eight-week clinical trial with 20 participants and meet relevant standards.

The team is led by Judith Klein-Seetharaman, a professor in ASU’s School of Molecular Sciences and the College of Health Solutions. Her protocol has four components. The first is a lifestyle and supplementation approach drawing on the laboratories of Susan Racette and the Klein-Seetharaman group, with biological targets of supplements modeled at scale on ASU’s high-performance computing infrastructure.

The second phase tests people’s responses to oxygen and atmospheric pressure.

The third is AI-driven adaptive resistance training developed by The Smart Fit Method. The fourth is digital-twin personalization built on metabolomic profiling, developed by Theriome, a startup founded by ASU alumnus Paniz Jasbi.

We at HPO.TECH built the hyperbaric chamber that supports the second component.

The chamber was designed in close consultation with Joseph Dituri, a retired Navy commander and undersea-medicine specialist who spent 100 days living in an underwater habitat off Key Largo, and who is now an associate professor at the University of South Florida and a core member of the ASU team. Dituri understands what the human body does under sustained pressure exposure better than most people alive. He had specific requirements: The chamber needed to simulate atmospheric conditions ranging from the summit of Mount Everest to depths well below sea level, and it needed to move between them with enough precision to support a research-grade protocol.

Participants spend roughly 15 minutes under simulated high-altitude conditions, then with one hour of hyperbaric oxygen. The cycle repeats daily across the trial.

The reason for that structure comes from two distinct lines of physiology. Brief hypoxia exposure elicits adaptive responses including erythropoietin production and activation of the HIF-1α pathway, both well-characterized in altitude medicine. Hyperbaric oxygen exposure has been studied in clinical settings for decades, and more recent work has examined possible effects on biomarkers associated with cellular aging. A 2020 study in the journal Aging by Hachmo and colleagues at Israel’s Shamir Medical Center reported telomere lengthening and reduced senescent cell counts in older adults after a 60-session hyperbaric oxygen protocol. Whether sequential hypoxia and hyperoxia exposure produces similar or compounded effects is exactly the kind of question the ASU protocol is designed to test.

For the engineering team at HPO.TECH, the project sits in a category we’ve been working toward for some time. Most hyperbaric chambers do one thing: deliver pressurized oxygen at a fixed range. The multibaric platform we built for ASU puts both pressure and oxygen concentration under programmable control, which means a researcher can design a protocol and the chamber will execute it the same way every session. That is what research-grade equipment actually means in this field, and it is rarer than the marketing around hyperbaric medicine often suggests.

The full trial will involve 200 participants with daily interventions across a year, and follow-up that runs into the early 2030s. The team is also pursuing Investigational new drug approval from the FDA before any new components are integrated into the final design.

We do not know yet whether the ASU protocol will deliver what the team is hoping for. That is the point of running the trial. What we do know is that the question deserves a serious answer, and that the equipment used to find that answer has to do exactly what the protocol asks of it, every session, for years.

That is the engineering problem we set out to solve. The rest is now in the hands of the scientists.

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To learn more about HPO.TECH multibaric and hyperbaric systems for clinical and research applications, visit www.hpotech.com.