Biotech & Longevity · Tuesday, 8 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

A pig kidney kept a man off dialysis for 271 days, then came out so a human one could go in

Biotech & Longevity 22 sources

Tim Andrews lived nine months on a kidney from a gene-edited pig, the longest anyone has managed on an animal organ. It failed, was removed, and he then took a human kidney that is still working - which is the result the field had been waiting for.

271 days

Tim Andrews spent off dialysis on a pig's kidney before it was removed

no earlier pig kidney had been documented past two months in a living person [1]

gene edits made to Wilma, the pig whose kidney it was

some blocked immune rejection, others disabled pig viruses that might infect a person [1]

9% against 40%

his chance of a human kidney in five years, against his chance of dying or leaving the list

which is why an untested animal organ was offered to him at all [1]

new antibodies against human tissue after the pig kidney came out

the fear had been that a pig organ would ruin a later human transplant [1]

The lead story — what happened

Tim Andrews, a 66-year-old man whose kidneys had failed, lived 271 days without dialysis on a kidney taken from a pig. [1]
That is the longest anyone has lived on an animal organ. Before this, no pig kidney transplant had been documented past two months. [1]
The kidney came from Wilma, a Yucatan miniature pig whose genome carried 69 edits - some to stop the organ being rejected, some to disable pig viruses. [1]
After about six months the kidney's blood vessels were damaged, the organ began to fail, and surgeons took it out at nine months. [1]
Andrews went back on dialysis for several months, then received a kidney from a dead human donor, which was still working after six months of follow-up. [1]
No new antibodies against human tissue were found, so the pig organ had not made the human transplant harder. That is the result the field was waiting for. [1]
eGenesis, the company that bred and gene-edited the pigs, said two of its first recipients have now received human kidneys. [2]
Andrews had a 9% chance of getting a human kidney within five years, against a more than 40% chance of dying or being dropped from the waiting list first. [1]
The doctors call the pig kidney a bridge rather than a replacement - something to cross the wait on, not an organ to keep. [1]
Andrews was checked for pig viruses and other pig germs at every stage, and none were ever found. [1]
The report covers one patient with no comparison group, and the team says the outcome reflects careful selection and intensive specialist care. [1]

Who is involved

Tim Andrews

a 66-year-old man from New Hampshire whose kidneys had failed from type 2 diabetes; he took the pig organ
Mass General Brigham

the Boston hospital group that did the transplant and published the case in The Lancet, a medical journal
eGenesis

the US company that breeds and gene-edits the pigs; it made Wilma and announced the two later human transplants
Leonardo Riella

a kidney specialist at Mass General Brigham who works on the transplants; he calls a pig organ a bridge, not a destination
Wilma

a Yucatan miniature pig, bred with 69 changes to her genome so her kidney would survive in a person

How it unfolded

January 2025 Wilma's kidney is transplanted into Tim Andrews at Massachusetts General Hospital [1]
Six months in the kidney's blood vessels are damaged and the organ starts to fail [1]
Day 271 the pig kidney is removed and Andrews returns to dialysis [1]
Months later he receives a kidney from a dead human donor [1]
This week The Lancet publishes the case, and eGenesis says two recipients have now had human kidneys [1][2]

Where this points

Watch whether the next patients get past 271 days without the blood-vessel damage that ended this one - that is what would turn a bridge into an organ people keep. [1]

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

The shortage of human kidneys High↑

far more people need a kidney than there are human donors, and many die waiting [1]

Evidence that pig organs last Building↑

271 days is a record and it is still one man, with nobody to compare him to [1]

Fear of spoiling a later transplant Easing↓

no antibodies appeared, and two eGenesis recipients have since taken human kidneys [1][2]

Reliance on the dialysis machine Steady→

Andrews went back on dialysis for months while a human kidney was found [1]

The rest of the day

16 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Novo Nordisk ends two more heart trials

Novo Nordisk told investigators on Friday it was winding up HERMES and ATHENA, two late-stage trials of ziltivekimab. [3][4] The drug is a monthly injection that blocks IL-6, a protein that switches on inflammation. The trials had enrolled 4,900 and 673 people with heart failure, and were meant to show the drug delayed death or hospital admission. [4] A monitoring committee judged both unlikely to succeed, given the low chance of a different answer from ZEUS, a larger trial that missed its main goal in July. [3][4] One study is left, Artemis, reporting next year. [4]

Why it matters — The idea that lowering inflammation protects the heart now rests on a single remaining trial. Analysts had put ziltivekimab's peak sales at around $3 billion a year. [4]
03
An AI-designed drug lowered six measures of biological age

Insilico Medicine, a company that uses artificial intelligence to design drugs, said on Monday that its candidate rentosertib reduced biological age on six separate ageing clocks. [5][7] An ageing clock is software that estimates how fast a body is ageing from what is in the blood. The drug was designed by software to hit a target called TNIK, and tested in a 12-week trial in a scarring lung disease. [5][6] Researchers measured 2,841 proteins in blood from 42 people in that trial, and all six clocks pointed the same way. [6][7] It was published in Nature Biotechnology. [5][6]

Why it matters — The authors say plainly that the clocks alone cannot separate an anti-ageing effect from the drug simply treating the lung disease, and Insilico has not tested it in healthy people. [5][6]
04
Novartis pressure moves to a $12bn muscle drug

Novartis shares fell after a failed study of its cholesterol drug pelacarsen. [8] Analysts said the weight now falls on del-desiran, an experimental drug for muscular dystrophy whose results are due in the last three months of the year. [8] Barclays analysts said success there is needed to justify the $12 billion Novartis paid for it. [8] Results are also due this year on remibrutinib in a painful skin condition; the same drug succeeded in a multiple sclerosis trial last week. [8]

Why it matters — One missed trial does not only cost a company that drug. It raises what every remaining result has to carry, and analysts reprice the whole pipeline against it. [8]
05
Semaglutide cut obesity in children aged six to eleven

Novo Nordisk said on Monday that 40.4% of children aged 6 to under 12 given semaglutide were no longer classified as having obesity after 68 weeks, if they took every dose. [9] Semaglutide is the ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic; it copies a gut hormone that curbs appetite. Every child in the trial, called STEP Young, also got a reduced-calorie diet and more exercise. [9] Novo said safety looked as it had in adults and teenagers. [9]

Why it matters — Prescriptions of this class of drug to American children under 12 have risen more than 300-fold since 2019, although none is approved for that age group. [9]
06
A two-year lifestyle programme improved thinking across 11 countries

Older adults at risk of dementia in 11 Latin American countries improved their memory and thinking after two years of a programme combining exercise, diet, brain training and social contact. [10] Those given regular coaching improved substantially more than those handed general health advice. The trial, called LatAm-FINGERS and funded by the Alzheimer's Association, was presented at a conference in London and published in The Lancet. [10] Its authors adapted an American programme to local food and habits rather than translating it. [10]

Why it matters — Almost every dementia prevention trial runs in rich countries. This one tested whether the same programme survives being moved somewhere else, and it did. [10]
07
TScan cuts three quarters of its staff

TScan Therapeutics said on 2 September it would cut 75% of its workforce and stop developing its blood-cancer and autoimmune programmes, to concentrate on cell therapies for solid tumours. [11] Chief executive Gavin MacBeath said it is seeking partners for the paused programmes, and blamed a shortage of money for halting enrolment in one late-stage trial. [11] The cuts land two weeks after Amgen abandoned a $500 million partnership with TScan on Crohn's disease. [11]

Why it matters — When a large partner walks away, a small company's whole pipeline gets reordered by the missing money rather than by the science. [11]
08
Doctors' groups issue the vaccine advice the CDC used to

Organisations representing American paediatricians, family doctors and obstetricians jointly released guidance on 2 September on who should have flu, Covid-19 and RSV vaccines this winter. [12][13] They did it with the University of Minnesota's Vaccine Integrity Project rather than with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency they used to work through. [12] That arrangement broke down after the CDC's vaccine advisory panel was dismantled, its members fired in June 2025. [12] The American Medical Association also signed on. [13]

Why it matters — Doctors still need a list of who should be vaccinated. When the agency that wrote it stops, the list moves to whoever will write it, and loses the weight of a government recommendation. [12][13]
09
US measles cases pass 3,100, the most in 35 years

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on 4 September that 3,134 measles cases had been confirmed in the country this year, the highest annual total in more than 35 years. [14] About 94% were in people unvaccinated or of unknown vaccination status, and 248 of them went to hospital. [14] The agency has logged 38 outbreaks this year against 48 in 2025. [14] It still leaves out two deaths Pennsylvania reported on 25 August while it reviews whether measles caused them. [14]

Why it matters — The case count and the death count are being settled by two different processes, and only one of them has finished. [14]
10
Fake copies of an unapproved weight-loss drug are sending people to hospital

Counterfeit versions of retatrutide, an Eli Lilly weight-loss injection that no regulator anywhere has approved, are being sold in British gyms, beauty salons and on social media. [15] Doctors told the BBC that young, fit people arrive in hospital with vomiting, diarrhoea and in some cases kidney failure, not knowing what they were injected with. [15] Tom Davies, 20, from Brighton, ordered vials from a Chinese supplier and later worked out he had taken eight times the intended dose. [15] About half of drugs at this stage of testing are never approved. [15]

Why it matters — Copies of a drug that is still being tested are new. The fakes are imitating something whose real safety record nobody has established yet. [15]
11
A year after big drugmakers pulled research out of the UK

A year ago AstraZeneca, Merck and other large drugmakers pulled research spending out of the United Kingdom. [16] The trigger was the UK government raising the share of new-medicine sales firms must pay back to the National Health Service, from 15.5% to 31.3%. [16] Executives were called before Parliament and called the country an increasingly challenging place to bring forward new medicines. [16] The rebate has since been cut to 14.5% of sales for 2026, from 22.9%. [16]

Why it matters — What a health service pays for new medicines and how much research money lands in that country turned out to be one negotiation, not two. [16]
12
Ageing-related disease is now the biggest lifetime burden anywhere

Researchers writing in Nature Aging sorted every disease in the Global Burden of Disease database by when in life it strikes, giving four groups: infant, early-adult, later-adult and ageing-related. [17] Ageing-related diseases are the largest single part of the world's disease burden and the biggest lifetime burden facing a newborn, including in low-income countries. [17] Global life expectancy has risen from 58 in 1973 to over 73, and the share of people aged 65 and over has doubled to 10%. [17] The authors argue these diseases have a property the others lack: cutting them makes further cuts more worthwhile. [17]

Why it matters — The usual picture is that poor countries face infections and rich ones face ageing. This says a baby born anywhere now faces ageing-related illness as its largest lifetime risk. [17]
13
Millions lose muscle with age and nothing is approved for it

A review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery set out where treatment stands for sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and strength that comes with age. [18] It reduces mobility, causes falls and fractures and raises the risk of death, and there are no approved therapies for it anywhere. [18] The authors put that down to the number of separate things driving it at once, so no single target works. [18] Candidates being tried include molecules related to NAD+, blockers of a protein called myostatin, and drugs aimed at the low-grade inflammation of old age. [18]

Why it matters — Almost everyone who lives long enough gets it. It has a recognised clinical definition and there is nothing licensed to give anyone who has it. [18]
14
The biggest genetic study of multiple sclerosis points at nerve cells

A study in Nature Genetics compared the genomes of 20,831 people with multiple sclerosis against 729,220 people without it. [19] Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system strips the coating off nerves, and earlier genetic work had pointed almost entirely at immune cells. [19] This study found 236 variants linked to the disease outside the main immune region, four of them never identified before. [19] Adding single-cell data from blood and brain gave 76 candidate genes, and inhibitory neurons - nerve cells whose job is to quieten other nerve cells - stood out. [19]

Why it matters — Almost every drug for the disease calms the immune attack from outside. This says part of the inherited risk sits in the nerve cells being attacked. [19]
15
Immune cells outside the brain drove brain damage in mice

Researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience that mice bred to build up tau tangles were protected from nerve damage if they lacked an immune messenger cell called cDC1. [20] Tau tangles are one of the two protein deposits found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. These messenger cells sit outside the brain and switch on killer T cells by showing them fragments of protein. [20] Without them, fewer of those T cells entered the brain, and the ones that did failed to multiply. [20] In people, more brain T cells has long tracked with worse tau damage. [20]

Why it matters — If the trigger sits outside the brain, a drug might not have to cross into it. This is mice, though, and tau-tangle mice have misled this field before. [20]
16
Iron deficiency affects nearly one in three American adults

The New York Times examined ferritin face, the name social media gives to a tired, sallow, dark-circled look claimed to signal low iron. [21] Ferritin is the protein that stores iron in the body, and a blood test for it is how a shortage is found. Iron deficiency is the world's most common nutritional deficiency and affects almost one in three adults in the United States, disproportionately women. [21] Doctors quoted said the tiredness is often written off as the ordinary cost of a busy life. [21]

Why it matters — A cosmetic label invented on social media pushed people toward a blood test the medical system had been skipping. [21]
17
Why people really do smell different as they get older

The Guardian set out the biology behind what gets called old person smell. [22] It comes from a compound called 2-nonenal, made when the natural oils coating the skin oxidise and break down. [22] The fatty acids in those oils change with age while the skin repairs everyday wear more slowly, so more oil is exposed and more 2-nonenal is released. [22] A Japanese study in 2001 tested people aged 26 to 75 and first detected it at 40. [22] In a 2012 study, 41 young adults rated the oldest group's T-shirts as less intense and less unpleasant than the others. [22]

Why it matters — It is skin chemistry, not hygiene, and the one blind test anyone has run found the smell people are embarrassed by is not the one they dislike. [22]

02 Lesson why it matters

You can only test what you are able to take back out

A pig kidney could be tried in a living man because a dialysis machine can do a kidney's job while the experiment is undone, and nothing does a heart's.

The twist

The organ doctors have learned most about replacing is the kidney, and not because kidney failure is the worst thing that can happen to you. It is because a machine can do a kidney's job while you take the experiment back out.

How it works

Any untried treatment carries a real chance of harm
Whether anyone is allowed to try it depends less on the odds than on what happens if it fails
A kidney has a stand-in: a dialysis machine can do its job for years
So a pig kidney could be put in, and taken out again when it failed
A heart, a liver or a brain has no such stand-in
So the organ doctors have learned most about replacing is not the one that kills fastest

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

Novo Nordisk ending HERMES and ATHENA

the same step: a monitoring committee could stop both trials halfway, because a monthly injection stops working when you stop giving it and the patients go back to ordinary heart-failure care
The two-year lifestyle programme across 11 countries

the same step at the other end: exercise, diet and company could be tested for two years on older adults across 11 countries because none of it can hurt them
Semaglutide given to children aged six to eleven

the same step in children: a weekly injection can be stopped, and every child also got diet and exercise support, which is what made a 68-week trial in six-year-olds possible

Where you've seen this

Rock climbing

the hardest moves get attempted on a rope, and go untried on the same rock without one

Software

a risky change ships behind a switch someone can flip back; a change that rewrites stored records ships far more slowly

Learner drivers

a beginner is let onto a real road because the instructor has a second brake pedal

The catch

The way back is not free. Andrews spent several months on dialysis waiting for a human kidney, and dialysis is exhausting. In much of the world it is not on offer at all, so the fallback that made this experiment thinkable in Boston does not exist for most people whose kidneys fail.

And the whole of it

Nobody sat down and decided that kidneys should go first. It followed from the fact that a machine exists which can do a kidney's job for a while, and no equivalent machine exists for a liver or a brain. What any of us can be offered when we get ill was shaped by that, long before we were the patient, and there was never a meeting about it.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Tim Andrews's pig kidney failed after about six months and was cut out at nine, so the record is not the finding. The finding is that he went back on dialysis, then took a human kidney that still worked six months later, with no new antibodies against human tissue. [1] Nobody has solved the shortage of human kidneys here. What is being tested is a way of surviving the wait for one.

Why it works on us — A named man, a named pig and a record number of days are easy to picture, and they crowd out the ordinary half of the story, which is that the organ failed and had to come out. [1]

Who gains

eGenesis — Its pig kidneys now have published evidence that a xenograft does not spoil a later human transplant, which was the objection keeping the field to one-off cases. [1][2]
Mass General Brigham's transplant programme — Framing a pig kidney as a bridge means it no longer has to prove the organ lasts for years to justify further trials. [1]
Insilico Medicine — It got a longevity result out of a lung-disease trial it had already run and paid for, by measuring proteins in blood that was already collected. [5][6][7]
Novo Nordisk — Ending HERMES and ATHENA stops the spending on 5,573 patients' worth of study that its own monitoring committee said was unlikely to work. [3][4]
The American Medical Association and the four other medical societies — With the CDC's vaccine panel dismantled, their joint guidance is now the list American doctors follow on flu, Covid-19 and RSV shots. [12][13]
AstraZeneca, Merck and the other drugmakers that pulled out of the UK — A year on, the rebate they must pay on new medicines sold to the NHS has fallen to 14.5% of sales, from 22.9%. [16]

Who pays

Tim Andrews — The pig kidney's blood vessels were damaged by six months, it was removed at nine, and he spent several months back on dialysis before a human kidney was found. [1]
The 4,900 people in HERMES and the 673 in ATHENA — Their trials were wound up early with no benefit shown, and the plan had been to read out HERMES in the first half of 2027. [4]
Three quarters of TScan's staff — The company cut 75% of its workforce and paused its blood-cancer and autoimmune programmes, two weeks after Amgen walked away from a $500 million partnership. [11]
People with sarcopenia — Age-related muscle loss has a recognised clinical definition, causes falls, fractures and death, and there is no approved treatment for it anywhere. [18]
Young people buying fake retatrutide in British gyms — Doctors report them arriving in hospital with vomiting, diarrhoea and in some cases kidney failure, having no idea what dose they took. [15]
Unvaccinated Americans — About 94% of this year's 3,134 measles cases were in people unvaccinated or of unknown status, and 248 went to hospital. [14]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether a pig kidney can last longer than 271 days in anyone else.

This is one patient with no comparison group, and the team says the outcome reflects careful selection and intensive specialist care that may not be available elsewhere. [1]
02

What damaged the pig kidney's blood vessels at six months.

The Lancet report describes the damage and the failure that followed it, and does not name a cause. [1]
03

Whether rentosertib slows ageing at all.

Six ageing clocks agreed on blood from 42 people in a 12-week lung-disease trial, but the authors say the clocks alone cannot separate an ageing effect from the drug treating the lung disease, and Insilico has not tested it in healthy people. [5][6]
04

Whether lowering inflammation can protect the heart at all.

ZEUS missed in July, and HERMES and ATHENA were both stopped in September as unlikely to succeed. One trial, Artemis, is left, reporting in the first half of next year. [3][4]
05

How many measles deaths the United States has had this year.

The CDC's tally of 3,134 cases excludes two deaths that Pennsylvania reported on 25 August, while the agency reviews whether measles caused them. [14]
06

Whether the cognitive gains in the Latin American trial hold past two years.

The programme ran for two years and nobody has measured what happens after it stops. [10]
07

Whether del-desiran justifies the $12 billion Novartis paid for it.

Barclays analysts say success in that trial is needed to justify the price, and the results are not due until the last three months of the year. [8]
08

Who writes US vaccine guidance next winter.

The CDC's advisory panel was dismantled and its members fired in June 2025, medical societies filled the gap this year with the Vaccine Integrity Project, and no arrangement has been announced for what happens after that. [12][13]
09

What is actually inside the fake retatrutide being sold in British gyms.

Doctors say patients arrive in hospital not knowing what they were injected with or how much, and the real drug has not been approved anywhere, so there is no reference product. [15]

04 Hope carry this

Tim Andrews, 66, spent 271 days without a dialysis machine on a kidney from a pig called Wilma. When it failed he was given a human kidney, and six months later it was still working.

Also true today

Two of the first people ever to receive a gene-edited pig kidney have since received human kidneys. Doctors had feared the pig organ would leave antibodies that made a human transplant impossible, and it did not.
Older adults at risk of dementia in 11 Latin American countries had better memory and thinking after two years of exercise, diet, brain training and time spent with other people.
After 68 weeks on semaglutide alongside a reduced-calorie diet and more exercise, 40.4% of children aged 6 to under 12 in Novo Nordisk's trial were no longer classified as having obesity.