{"id":549868,"date":"2026-07-14T21:27:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T21:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549868\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T21:27:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T21:27:11","slug":"could-this-mysterious-disappearing-organ-hold-the-key-to-longevity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549868\/","title":{"rendered":"Could this mysterious disappearing organ hold the key to longevity?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1996, cryobiologist Gregory Fahy walked into his physician\u2019s office and talked his way into a month\u2019s supply of growth hormone. His hope, bolstered by a single study in rats1<\/a>, was that the injections would help him to regrow his thymus \u2014 a peculiar immune organ that atrophies and practically disappears as people age. Regenerating it, Fahy thought, would help him to live a longer, healthier life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

The improvement was obvious, at least according to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Fahy says. His functional thymic mass nearly doubled2<\/a>. Whether it made him feel any younger, however, was less clear. \u201cI was only 46 at the time, and more or less in peak health,\u201d he says, although subsequent attempts to regrow the tissue left him feeling \u201cenergized and invincible\u201d.<\/p>\n

What started as an unregulated self-experiment has developed into a series of small clinical trials run by a biopharmaceutical company called Intervene Immune in Torrance, California, at which Fahy is chief scientific officer.<\/p>\n

The company is not alone. An explosion of thymus research has taken place over the past three years, stimulated by reports in the literature that the health of the organ, once thought dispensable, is a probable indicator of a person\u2019s overall health<\/a>. Excitement intensified when a pair of studies published this year reported that dwindling thymic health correlates with an increased risk of death3<\/a>,4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Investors are responding. In January, a biotechnology company in Basel, Switzerland, called TECregen raised 10 million Swiss francs (US$12.4 million) to develop therapies to regenerate the thymus, which might help to slow ageing and prevent cancer, according to the company\u2019s website. It has not disclosed a drug candidate. Last October, Zag Bio, a thymus-focused biotech firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched with $80 million in funding. Venture-capital and pharmaceutical companies<\/a> have been reaching out to Fahy and other scientists and starting their own research programmes. \u201cThe interest now in this field is enormous,\u201d says Marcel van den Brink, chief physician and president of City of Hope, a cancer hospital and research centre in Duarte, California, who has studied the thymus since 1996. There was a \u201chuge perception that I was wasting my time\u201d, he says. But now, \u201cpeople are contacting us\u201d and taking the field seriously. (van den Brink is a scientific co-founder of a biotech company called Thymofox in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)<\/p>\n

Forgotten organ<\/p>\n

For decades, people thought that the thymus was vestigial. It has been \u201cforgotten\u201d and \u201cdisrespected\u201d, says Georg Holl\u00e4nder, an immunologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who is a co-founder of TECregen. In the 1920s, some researchers thought that the organ was involved in producing eggshells in birds but had limited roles in mammals. Decades later, Nobel-prizewinning biologist Peter Medawar referred to the thymus as \u201can evolutionary accident of no very great significance\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

They were wrong. The organ\u2019s importance had escaped scientists for so long in part because mammals that have their thymuses surgically removed seem to be perfectly healthy. It wasn\u2019t until the 1960s, when immunologist Jacques Miller performed the surgeries on newborn mice, that the function of the organ was discovered5<\/a>. Infant mice without a thymus often succumbed to infection and died. They had few immune cells in their lymph nodes.<\/p>\n

Miller found that the thymus creates T cells, a cell type that he also identified around the same time and which is named after the organ. T cells, we now know, are a crucial part of the immune system that attacks cancer cells and fights infections.<\/p>\n

In humans, the thymus shrinks drastically over a person\u2019s lifetime. After puberty, most of its cells turn into non-functional fatty tissue. The production of T cells slows. At age 40, the thymus produces roughly one-quarter of the T cells it did at age 8. At 65, it makes just 10%6<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Focus on function<\/p>\n

For this reason, many scientists assumed that fresh T cells were no longer needed for older individuals. \u201cPeople are under the impression that it\u2019s only important to make your T cells when you\u2019re young,\u201d says Jennifer Cowan, an immunologist at University College London. \u201cAnd that\u2019s just quite clearly not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three discoveries changed that paradigm. First, a 2023 study found that people who had their thymus surgically removed were almost three times more likely to die and twice as likely to develop a cancer five years after the surgery than were people who had not had their thymus removed7<\/a>. \u201cIt was very striking,\u201d Cowan says, \u201cto the point where people aren\u2019t going to want to have their thymus removed if they\u2019ve read that paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, in March, two back-to-back studies collectively analysed data from more than 31,000 individuals and extended the findings to people with intact thymuses that had naturally withered with age. One found that a smaller thymus correlates with a higher risk of death as well as a higher risk of developing cancer and cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure3<\/a>. The second found that a smaller thymus is linked to worse survival after receiving immunotherapy for cancer4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some scientists point out that the studies only offer correlations. \u201cWhen you\u2019re looking retrospectively, there\u2019s a lot of pieces of the puzzle that are just not knowable,\u201d says Daniel Boffa, a thoracic surgeon at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He and his colleagues performed a study that found little difference in the risk for recurring tumours among people who had all or part of their thymus removed to treat thymic cancer8<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, commercial and academic interest in the thymus has surged. \u201cRegrowth has become a big issue,\u201d says Yousuke Takahama, a developmental biologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. \u201cJust like rebooting your computer, it\u2019s like rebooting our immune system.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1996, cryobiologist Gregory Fahy walked into his physician\u2019s office and talked his way into a month\u2019s supply…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7493,2877,2026,61,60,521,2027,82],"class_list":["post-549868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ageing","tag-drug-discovery","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-medical-research","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}