GoKawiilIn 1996, cryobiologist Gregory Fahy walked into his physician’s office and talked his way into a month’s supply of growth hormone. His hope, bolstered by a single study in rats1, was that the injections would help him to regrow his thymus — 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.
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The improvement was obvious, at least according to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Fahy says. His functional thymic mass nearly doubled2. Whether it made him feel any younger, however, was less clear. “I was only 46 at the time, and more or less in peak health,” he says, although subsequent attempts to regrow the tissue left him feeling “energized and invincible”.
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.
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’s overall health. Excitement intensified when a pair of studies published this year reported that dwindling thymic health correlates with an increased risk of death3,4.
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’s 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 have been reaching out to Fahy and other scientists and starting their own research programmes. “The interest now in this field is enormous,” 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 “huge perception that I was wasting my time”, he says. But now, “people are contacting us” and taking the field seriously. (van den Brink is a scientific co-founder of a biotech company called Thymofox in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)
Forgotten organ
For decades, people thought that the thymus was vestigial. It has been “forgotten” and “disrespected”, says Georg Holländer, 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 “an evolutionary accident of no very great significance”.
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They were wrong. The organ’s importance had escaped scientists for so long in part because mammals that have their thymuses surgically removed seem to be perfectly healthy. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when immunologist Jacques Miller performed the surgeries on newborn mice, that the function of the organ was discovered5. Infant mice without a thymus often succumbed to infection and died. They had few immune cells in their lymph nodes.
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