Biotech, in brief

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]

Why it matters. 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]