Radically different
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Good morning. Lately, I’ve been listening to the “I Love Boosters” score when I need to focus at the office. The Tune-Yards-composed music is kooky, manic, and sort of makes my heart rate go up. I love it.
Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.
On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk.
The open-air venue was compact and decked out in bright blue, with a six-lane, 100-meter track down one side, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool down the other, and a weightlifting platform and stage at the front. You could see the golden façade of the Trump Hotel looming in the background. The scene had all the trappings of an NFL game, with the too-loud music and crowd work on the big screen—a “flex cam” gave the well-muscled an excuse to unveil their biceps. Between events, adverts flashed up for the line of performance products sold by Enhanced, the company behind the event: injectable peptides that supposedly support cellular energy and skin elasticity, daily supplement powders with names like “Stronger” and “Longer.”
Australian swimmer James Magnussen was the first athlete to sign up with Enhanced but hasn’t broken any world records. He finished last in his two events in Las Vegas.
The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”
At the bar, bodybuilders swapped before-and-after pictures and talked about their stacks, and VCs and finance bros traded LinkedIn details. Lukas Lakutsin, a 6-foot-10, 354-pound Russian bodybuilder who was milling around the entrance to the VIP suites, initially told me he didn’t use any performance-enhancing drugs. Except testosterone replacement therapy, of course. But he didn’t think that really counted. “I’m almost 34 years old,” he said. “I need to do this to stay strong.”
Jeremy Sigal, an influencer and author, wore a USA tank top that showed off hugely muscled arms adorned with prison tattoos. He told me he was proudly natural, in both his health and his personal life. “I’ve got an exceptional credit score,” he said. He has written 12 books on marketing and leadership. Later, I looked up his most recent book online. It’s called Simp to Pimp: 10 Steps to Fix Why She’s Not Banging You and lists AI as a coauthor.
What I saw in Las Vegas probably wasn’t the future of sport. But it was a perfect encapsulation of our present moment, as Silicon Valley biohackers, alt-right looksmaxxers, Make America Healthy Again boosters, and longevity-obsessed scientists all vie to remake reality in their own image. For them, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future where medical advances push the human race to new heights, and where they never have to get old.
I’ve tracked Enhanced’s journey from a crazy idea scribbled on a napkin to a public company valued at $1.2 billion. Behind the scenes, there have been power struggles, life-changing victories, and moments of total farce. As I recently, finally, watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: Were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
In December 2022, the Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza flew to Miami to spend New Year’s Eve with his friend and mentor Peter Thiel. A decade earlier, D’Souza had helped Thiel orchestrate the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker—a stunning revenge against the gossipy New York media blog that had outed him as gay. Now he was armed with a disruptive idea that he thought Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, would love. It was inspired by the buff bodies he’d been seeing at the gym, highlighting a disconnect between a workout culture where the use of steroids was an open secret and a sporting establishment where it was, at least on paper, an inviolable taboo.
His initial pitch was provocative and confrontational: a grand sporting event to rival the Olympic Games, where competitors could take any substance they wanted—their body, their choice. The first time I met D’Souza, in the spring of 2024, he had founded the company and attracted some initial investment but seemed obsessed with taking on the fat cats at the International Olympic Committee and reinventing sports (even though he didn’t seem to be a huge sports fan himself). On Enhanced’s Discord server, I found a folder full of memes with names like IOC Clowns.jpg. The whole thing felt very unserious.
That would change.
D’Souza told me that Thiel had previously introduced him to Christian Angermayer, a German biotech billionaire, who would come onboard at Enhanced. He’s funded clinical trials of psychedelics through his company Atai Life Sciences and is helping bring them into the medical mainstream as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Angermayer says he spotted an opportunity to do the same thing for steroids. What he really wants is to redefine medicine, he told me. Its focus has already changed from treating disease to trying to prevent it; actively enhancing people’s health, he says, is just the next logical step.
By early 2024, Angermayer had brought his own people into key roles. The team included Michael Sagner, an anti-aging expert and private doctor who works with many of Hollywood’s leading men, and Max Martin, who has the jawline and cheekbones of an Instagram looksmaxxing influencer and the boundless enthusiasm of a puppy. (He started his own enhancement program a few years ago, when he was just 27.) Sagner would head up Enhanced’s medical commission, making sure the games were safe for the athletes. It was Martin’s job to make sure they actually happened.
Tensions sparked as D’Souza’s freewheeling style clashed with the more sensible image that Sagner and others were now keen to present. “It was not just his personality and his abrasive way of talking,” Sagner told me recently. “Even when he was briefed on a scientific fact, he would just completely ignore it and say something outrageous.”
But the more outrageous D’Souza got, the more attention his idea received. In February 2024, James Magnussen, a retired Australian swimmer, became the organization’s first official athlete, and Enhanced promised to pay a million dollars to him, or anyone else, who could break the world record in the 50-meter freestyle.
The notion of a “steroid olympics,” as many have dubbed the Enhanced Games, had been kicking around for decades—for instance, in a Wired article from the early 2000s and an SNL sketch from the 1980s. Two things helped finally make the Enhanced Games a reality. First, in November 2024, Donald Trump was again elected president of the United States. The Biden administration had been actively hostile to the games, but the founders saw a more receptive political environment in Trump world. Not long after the election, Enhanced announced a new tranche of funding led by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr.
And second, in February 2025, an enhanced swimmer finished the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in human history. It wasn’t Magnussen, though. He had been injecting himself with testosterone to grow muscle, plus a cocktail of peptides that aimed to speed up recovery—but his journey hadn’t quite worked the way he’d planned.
A combination of reputational issues (no pools wanted to host his training) and physical complications (the regimen did help him get stronger, but he packed on so much muscle that it slowed him down in the water) meant he watched from the sidelines as the Bulgarian-Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev—who had finished fifth at the Paris Olympics in 2024—came in two-hundredths of a second under the record and won a million-dollar payout from Enhanced. The idea has always been that breaking records would effectively prove the legitimacy of this enhancement project: Look what we can do now.
Gkolomeev, though, had a different motivation for participating: “One successful year in the Enhanced Games and I could make as much as I would in almost 10 careers,” he told me not long after setting the new record (notably, wearing a kind of “supersuit” that’s been banned by World Aquatics since 2010). Enhanced was paying its athletes a regular salary, on top of any potential bonus. And he had a young family to support and feared that the four-year stretch to the next Olympics would be long and precarious.
In May 2025, with a world record in the bag and a friendly administration in the White House, Enhanced was ready to announce its first games: They’d take place in May 2026 at Resorts World in Las Vegas.
At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.
“The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds,” says Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. “From my perspective, this significantly changes the nature of the project. It is one thing to organize a closed sporting event built around controversial principles, but openly marketing and commercializing substances such as testosterone, hGH, GLP-1 drugs, peptides, and other pharmacological compounds is something else entirely.”
As the games approached, more athletes joined. Some were genuinely elite. The US sprinter Kerley—who is serving a two-year ban for missing three drug tests—had won silver in the 100 meters in the Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in Paris. Ben Proud, a British swimmer, had won silver at the Paris Olympics and dozens of medals at world and European championships and the Commonwealth Games. He had been mulling over joining the Enhanced Games ever since the idea first emerged, but the tipping point seemed to come when Gkolomeev’s record was announced.
Some participants, like Magnussen and another swimmer, Megan Romano, had been tempted out of retirement. Romano hadn’t swum competitively for almost a decade. Others were at the start of their careers but ready to cash in their chips and bid goodbye to Olympic dreams for a potential six-figure payday. The $1 million payouts were reserved for records in the two flagship events—the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter sprint—but winning any other event would mean a prize of $250,000, with an additional $250,000 bonus for setting a world record.
Athletes would get paid even if they just showed up and finished last—as much as $50,000. This is all on top of the salaries that stretched into six figures in some cases, making the payout from the games more than many athletes make in a year.
Sport’s governing bodies reacted to each new athlete announcement with fury. World Aquatics threatened to ban for life any athlete who participated in the games, even if they didn’t take any drugs. Enhanced responded with an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against the global swimming organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and USA Swimming, alleging misuse of monopoly power.
In November 2025, a court in New York dismissed the case. Three days later, D’Souza, the mind behind the entire project, was out. A notice on Enhanced’s website said he had “transitioned out of the company’s day-to-day operations.” Martin would take over as CEO. “The investors basically said we need someone a bit more serious,” Sagner told me. In conversations, execs at Enhanced played down any suggestion of a feud—D’Souza was simply the ideas man, with little interest in the day-to-day dreariness of actually running a company. (Enhanced spokesperson Chris Jones wrote in a statement that “there is no tension between Aron and Enhanced that I’m aware of.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)
I got the sense that Enhanced, in its new iteration as a pharmaceutical subscription company, was almost embarrassed by the games. When I visited enhanced.com a couple of months before the event, they had been relegated to a sub-heading on the home page. D’Souza’s showmanship had helped get attention for what was becoming a run-of-the-mill telehealth business like Hims & Hers—albeit one well timed to take advantage of a shifting regulatory landscape around peptides, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services, has been pushing the FDA to approve despite a lack of evidence that they’re actually effective.
Sagner is still loosely involved with Enhanced, but he says the medical commission was not consulted before it launched its line of performance products. (Jones did not respond to a question regarding this claim.) Sagner is scathing about what he sees as the “hype” around peptides. “I can tell you already, peptides do nothing,” he says—with the exception of human growth hormone and GLP-1. “The peptides that people use, black-market peptides that they buy online—they do nothing. We have tested them; 80% of them contain nothing. It’s saline solution, salt water, and some of them are contaminated.”
At the end of January 2026, a group of around 40 swimmers, weightlifters, and sprinters arrived in Abu Dhabi to start their individualized enhancement “protocol,” as Enhanced calls it. Officially, they would be taking part in a clinical trial, pending approval by the Abu Dhabi government and overseen by Guido Pieles, a Qatar-based cardiologist who has taken over the reins of Enhanced’s medical commission from Sagner.
They would be allowed to choose only from a menu of specific FDA-approved drugs. Pieles broke them down into five categories: testosterone variants and growth hormones, which can both boost muscle mass; metabolic modulators that can tweak how the body burns fat; stimulants like Adderall to improve focus; and EPO, which can increase the amount of oxygen the blood is able to carry. While Enhanced’s team might recommend particular things, the athletes would have the final say on what they wanted to take, if anything. (As Oslo University’s Bjørnebekk points out, FDA approval “does not mean the substances are inherently safe, particularly not when used for enhancement purposes.”)
There would be regular blood tests, heart scans, and brain scans and access to the best training facilities money could buy. Pieles and others say the clinical trial will help inform the line of supplements Enhanced is offering consumers, but there’s actually very little overlap between the drugs the athletes were taking and the substances the company is currently selling.
Not long after they arrived in the Middle East, the athletes were awakened by the sound of explosions at a military base near their hotel. The US and Israel had struck Iran, and the Iranian regime was responding by peppering the region with missiles. “It wasn’t a pleasant situation,” says Andrii Govorov, the world record holder in the 50-meter butterfly, who a year earlier had become one of the first swimmers to join Enhanced. Govorov had some experience in these matters—back in Ukraine, he’d had a business selling cars that helped fund his swimming career, but he’d lost it after the Russian invasion.
Swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting were the focus of the first Enhanced Games but in many ways the sports were the sideshow.
The conflict exacerbated delays in getting approval for the clinical trial and sourcing the drugs, and as a result, what was supposed to be a 12-week enhancement protocol got cut down to eight weeks. The athletes didn’t actually start taking the drugs until toward the end of March. For those who had always been clean, that represented the irreversible crossing of a line. “The first injection was very emotional, very tricky to navigate,” says Proud. “For me, that was the day I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.”
Proud was joined in the enhancement program by his girlfriend, Emily Barclay, who had swum at college level without ever appearing at a major international event; she was working as a swimming teacher at a school in England. After that first injection, they left Abu Dhabi and spent a few days in Dubai as they reckoned with what they had done. “I just couldn’t be around the team,” Proud says. “I wanted to be by myself and feel those feelings, because it is a big deal to make that step, and I felt it.”
Those feelings were soon forgotten, though, as the drugs kicked in. Proud says he had incredible energy, and a drive to train that he hadn’t experienced before. Shania Collins, an American sprinter, says she had “increased strength, increased recovery, and increased mental clarity at practice.” Sagner and several athletes admitted there were some side effects: acne and some swelling around the joints; unwanted hair growth for the women, unwanted hair loss for the men.
One thing the athletes wouldn’t talk about, though, is what drugs they were actually taking. They all had the same reason: not wanting to encourage copycats who might take enhancements without a doctor on hand to tailor programs to their needs.
The one exception was Thor Björnsson (testosterone, deca-durabolin, anastrozole, halotestin), a hulking Icelandic deadlifter and former World’s Strongest Man who played The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Björnsson first heard about the games on Joe Rogan’s podcast and was immediately interested. The rules for strongman competitions are somewhat less stringent than those for Olympic sports, though, and he actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
There is some debate over how much doping some of the athletes were actually doing. In a conversation last year, Gkolomeev told me he’d only really been “microdosing,” and he confirmed that his 2026 enhancement program was largely the same. Sagner says the doses the athletes were taking were a fraction of the amounts some Olympic athletes had been caught using in the past. I heard that a few athletes had decided not to take steroids or growth hormones and were only using modafinil, a narcolepsy medication that’s thought to improve focus.
The day before the games, I asked Angermayer what it would mean if clean athletes like Kerley and Armstrong won their events—what impact it would have on Enhanced’s business model of using sports as a showcase for its line of performance products if the people using those products didn’t actually win anything. “I know what you mean, but mostly our business model is headlines to drive attention,” he said. “Any debate is good for us.”
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion.
That same week, it was finally go time. The athletes and coaches left Abu Dhabi and flew to Las Vegas, where they were put up in five-star luxury at the Conrad hotel inside Resorts World while they made their final preparations.
When I got there a few weeks later, toward the end of May, I found it jarring to see these hulking presences walking around the casino in their Enhanced sportswear, weaving their way through packs of half-drunk tourists, with slot machines flashing in the background and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I had expected the games to be a bigger deal within the city itself, but they were just one of a thousand things happening in Vegas that weekend—drowned out by a series of BTS shows at the football stadium, by the Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs, by No Doubt’s residency at the Sphere.
If this was a sporting earthquake, it was one whose tremors were mainly being felt online, where bodybuilding influencers livestreamed to their followers on Kick and Twitch, and where thousands watched on YouTube and Rumble. (D’Souza once told me he’d had “every major sports broadcaster” vying for the rights; in the end, Enhanced struck an exclusive streaming deal with Roku in the US.)
On the morning of the games, Enhanced held a medical symposium that was supposed to provide a taste of the company’s long-term objectives. The first speaker was Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed entrepreneur famous for plowing his personal fortune into wild attempts to reverse his aging: receiving transfusions of his teenage son’s plasma, measuring his nighttime erections, taking more than 100 supplement pills a day. He spends $2 million per year on all this, but he looked pale and vampiric as he delivered the slightly off-brand message that, really, the most important thing was getting a good night’s sleep: “You don’t need to chase IV infusions; you don’t need to chase crystals. You don’t really need to do much of anything.”
At 2 p.m., I took two escalators from the conference room down to the arena, where spectators were filtering in. Though it had cost $50 million, it had been constructed in just three and a half weeks, and it showed; on the media tour the previous day, there were still loose screws on the floor of the bleachers.
There were a few thousand seats in an open grandstand down one side, and two rows of VIP suites on the other. No tickets were sold, so it was a strange mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet. The rapper Tyga was the biggest name to grace the “blue carpet,” although I did also spot Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger. Rumors swirled that Peter Thiel might show up; they proved unfounded.
A few hours before the doors opened, journalists got a stern message from the organizers trying to bar us from interviewing guests. Still, I talked to a Cambridge professor who wanted to use Enhanced as a case study in innovation for his MBA students, a retired Brazilian swimmer with the Olympic rings tattooed on his forearm, and a biotech investor wearing an Enron hat. Proud’s family and friends were sheltered from the blazing sun in the shadow of the big screen.
D’Souza was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he really mentioned at all—not during the introductory press conference, where Martin was introduced as the “founder of the Enhanced Games,” nor during the event itself, where the athletes showered praise on Angermayer and Martin. But the tens of millions D’Souza had banked from the stock listing likely softened any blow. Plus, he’s already moved on to his next provocative venture: an AI-powered arbitration platform designed to scrutinize the work of journalists on behalf of the rich and powerful.
As the sun set behind the hills, casting the arena in soft gold light, there were still no world records. That and the wins for clean athletes seemed to put the whole Enhanced project in jeopardy—the knives were already being sharpened online. I asked the organizers whether this threatened the legitimacy of the project.
“Our response is that enhancements help athletes improve and, in some cases, break records. And yes, some non-enhanced athletes also won—because talent and ability also matter,” Enhanced’s Jones emailed last week. “Breaking world records is incredibly hard as the margin is infinitesimal, as we witnessed. Ignoring that 13 athletes some of whom 10 years later broke personal bests is disingenuous and selective reporting.”
Megan Romano was one of them, swimming faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she had at 22. And Emily Barclay knocked two seconds off her fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle, coming in second in that event and winning the 50-meter freestyle; she went home with a check for $375,000. “No one’s ever heard of this girl,” said Enhanced swim coach Brett Hawke afterwards. “She’s retired; she’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims a time that would have got a bronze medal in Paris.” For all the talk of “superhumanity” and pushing the boundaries of performance, making a 35-year-old feel 22 again is probably the perfect marketing message for the products Enhanced wants to sell.
Enhanced’s executives say people should take enhancements only with medical supervision, but price could be a barrier to heeding that advice. The battery of health tests the company was giving its athletes in the run-up to the games cost $25,000 per athlete per month. The drugs themselves start at $75 a month and go up toward $200. While Jones says the products “are in line with industry price points,” there were almost certainly people watching who saw the drug-altered physiques of athletes like Gkolomeev or Magnussen and decided to find cheaper, less safe alternatives on unlicensed websites.
“Many of these substances require medical supervision and prescriptions, and several are associated with potentially serious long-term health consequences,” says Bjørnebekk. “Presenting them in this lifestyle-oriented and commercial format risks normalizing use while downplaying the medical risks and uncertainties.”
Before the night was over, Gkolomeev again had the chance to right the Enhanced ship. The final event of the night was the men’s 50-meter freestyle swim. His 2025 time had been surpassed by the Australian swimmer Cam McEvoy (without a supersuit) at the China Swimming Open a couple of months before, so he needed to lose another two-hundredths of a second to beat the new record of 20.88 seconds.
Gkolomeev was wearing the same supersuit he’d used the previous year, and he’d shaved off his mustache for a little extra streamlining. But he messed up his start—doing four kicks instead of five—and was trailing Proud at the halfway mark. His long arms levered him forward, though, and he reached the wall in 20.81. The spectators were on their feet as “WORLD RECORD” flashed red on the big screen. Martin vaulted over the glass partition from the VIP suites, beaming, to embrace Gkolomeev. They had their record.
Or did they? Online, people shared screenshots from the video feed, purporting to show that the clock had stopped before Gkolomeev’s hand touched the pressure sensor at the end of the pool. An Enhanced spokesperson gave a statement to the Guardian dismissing this as “completely unfounded internet drivel.” But hey—live by the sword, die by the sword. It’s quite possible Gkolomeev didn’t care. He had another million in the bank.
It remains to be seen if it’ll work out so well for the other athletes. Enhanced organizers recently announced a prize of $10 million for anyone who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in 2027. They are adamant that the games will happen again next year. If they don’t, dozens of sporting careers will be over, and the athletes will join the long list of victims of VC-backed disruption.
My personal prediction is that Enhanced will pivot away from the risk and uncertainty of a flagship event—the company’s valuation plunged by almost $800 million when markets opened after what was perceived as an underwhelming set of results in Vegas. I expect you’ll see individual stunts and challenges, tightly controlled and filmed for virality and probably featuring your favorite YouTubers—think Björnsson bench-pressing Jake Paul.
D’Souza’s initial idea has served its purpose by capturing the world’s attention. But that won’t necessarily translate into success either. Though the company has had plenty of hype over the last 12 months, SEC filings published as part of its stock exchange listing reveal that it generated only $2,755 in revenue from its enhancements business in the first three months of 2026. Would what happened in Vegas be enough to juice sales?
As the athletes gathered on the stage to receive their prizes, Martin took the microphone and addressed the crowd. “Enhanced is culture,” he said. “We are at the pulse of where the world is going.” On this, at least, he’s probably right. Testosterone replacement therapy is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and while the science may still not be there on peptides, they have certainly exploded in popularity in the two years since Enhanced launched. And there are undoubtedly more substances yet to be discovered that will promise to improve people’s lives, or at least hold their appearance in stasis. The enhanced age is upon us, whether we want it or not.
As the fireworks went off and the Killers closed out the event with “When You Were Young” (“Congratulations to … whoever deserves it,” said frontman Brandon Flowers), I wondered what that might mean for us mere mortals. Invoking Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a story about drugs and Las Vegas may be a cliché, but it struck me that fear played a big part in all of this. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of never making a dime on your life’s pursuit. Fear of waking up one morning and seeing your flabby, sunken face in the mirror while everyone around you shines and grins and thrives with white-toothed, alien smiles.
But the big problem with Enhanced’s vision of superhumanity is the question of who gets to join in. “People will be able to enhance themselves if they have enough money,” Sagner had told me the night before the games. The rest of us, I fear, will just have to function as normal human beings.
Amit Katwala is a journalist and author covering science, culture, and where they collide. His latest book is Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based in London.
LONDON — In Europe, two divergent paths are emerging as countries grapple with what to do about drug prices, affecting pharma companies and patients across the continent — and testing the influence of the U.S.
In the U.K., after a pressure campaign from both pharma companies and the Trump administration, the government has adopted more industry-friendly policies while also simply promising to spend more on medicines.
Germany, another of the continent’s biggest markets, is headed in the opposite direction. Facing growing deficits in its health budget, the government has proposed moves that would cut spending and increase the fees the industry has to pay.
The number of prescription drug shortages in the U.S. fell by 23% last year, marking the second consecutive year of declines and the lowest level since 2017, according to a new analysis that otherwise found troubling signs about medicines that are in short supply.
For instance, the average drug shortage lasted 5.3 years, exceeding the 4.3 years seen in 2024 and greatly outpacing the average two-year shortage experienced in 2019. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of out-of-stock medicines were in short supply for more than three years, and 39% were unavailable for more than five years.
Meanwhile, the 75 drugs that were in short supply last year spanned 130 therapeutic categories, indicating that shortages affected a wide range of diseases and patient populations, according to the analysis by U.S. Pharmacopeia, an independent organization that develops standards for medicines.
You know that 1980s Dolly Parton hit “9 to 5”? I wonder if RFK Jr. has heard it? He often works in his office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the New York Times. Send news tips and ways to make a livin’ to John.Wilkerson@statnews.com or John_Wilkerson.07 on Signal.
The federal government paid for a report on alcohol consumption. But it refused to publish the results, which show that even people who drink less than one alcoholic beverage a day are increasing their chances of developing a serious illness, Isabella Cueto reports.
The scientists who conducted the study believe the findings were suppressed because they are unfavorable to powerful special interests.
Incyte has agreed to acquire Vega Therapeutics for up to $2 billion, the companies said, in a deal designed to bolster the buyer’s hematology pipeline with antibody assets led by VGA039, a Phase III candidate for von Willebrand disease (VWD).
Vega, a wholly owned subsidiary of privately held Star Therapeutics, focuses on developing treatments for bleeding disorders. Vega’s lead candidate VGA039 could, if approved, be the first subcutaneous prophylactic therapy with a more convenient once-monthly, self-administered dosing regimen for patients with VWD, compared with current therapies requiring more frequent (2-3x/week) intravenous infusions.
VGA039 is a monoclonal antibody designed to modulate Protein S with the aim of improving hemostasis, potentially improving the body’s ability to control bleeding in numerous bleeding disorders. VGA039 is under study in the Phase III VIVID-6 trial (NCT07115004), a global single arm crossover study designed to investigate the safety and efficacy of subcutaneous administration of VGA039 as prophylaxis for bleeding in patients with every type of VWD, including those with a high disease burden.
VIVID-6’s estimated completion date is October 2028, with data expected to be read out in early 2029.
“VGA039 fits directly into our strategy of building a top-tier growth company for the future,” Incyte CEO Bill Meury said in a statement. “It is a first-in-class, Phase III asset with compelling early data, a manageable development path and the potential to become an important new growth driver in one of our core therapeutic areas, hematology. The transaction has all of the attributes we look for in business development opportunities.”
In a presentation to analysts Monday morning, Incyte quantified that potential market opportunity as “$1B+ global net sales opportunity.”—an estimate with which three analysts concur:
“VGA039 has the potential to address a clear unmet need for a practical, targeted therapy for von Willebrand disease, and even with conservative assumptions around pricing and market penetration, VGA039 has a clear path to a more than $1 billion market opportunity,” Matt Phipps, PhD, partner and group head of biotechnology equity research with William Blair, wrote Monday in a research note.
“Overall, we believe the deal for VGA039 fits well into Incyte’s current hematology franchise and capabilities and offers a relatively de-risked Phase III asset with blockbuster commercial potential in the 2030s,” Phipps added.
Jessica Fye, a managing director and senior equity research analyst with J.P. Morgan, was also bullish on VGA039’s commercial potential: “We think mgmt [management] framing VGA039 as a potential $1bn+ global sales opportunity is credible and think it should be able to leverage some of INCY’s existing presence with hematology centers.”
Faisal Khurshid, equity analyst with Jefferies, agreed that VGA039 “could have blockbuster potential” assuming it is priced at about $500,000/year compared with the $0.5 to $1 million range of current prophylactic therapies, and assuming ~2,000 patients at hemophilia treatment centers receive frequent IV prophylaxis out of 7,000-10,000 patients who have severe or recurrent bleeds.
“We feel that VGA039 largely fits INCY’s strategic goals and is well-positioned to succeed in Ph[ase III],” Khurshid wrote in a research note.
Despite the positive comments from analysts, Incyte shares dipped 1.7% Monday, from $102.38 to $100.64, though the stock rebounded Tuesday in early trading, rising nearly 3% to $103.31 as of 10:25 a.m. ET.
VGA039 has received the FDA’s Fast Track, Orphan Drug, Breakthrough Therapy, and Rare Pediatric Disease (RPD) designations. The RPD designation made Star Therapeutics eligible to receive a Rare Pediatric Disease Priority Review Voucher (PRV) upon approval of a Biologics License Application for VGA039—eligibility that would transfer to Incyte if its acquisition of Vega occurs as planned. The voucher may be redeemed to obtain priority review for a subsequent marketing application or transferred or sold to another sponsor.
The Breakthrough Therapy designation was supported by interim data from the Phase I/II multidose study (NCT05776069) of VGA039 in adult and adolescent patients with VWD, showing substantial bleed reductions across all types of VWD and all types of bleeds. The data was presented at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition in December 2025.
Vega’s pipeline includes two other programs, both preclinical—a complement therapy program, and an undisclosed program.
Acquiring Vega and its pipeline is among moves Incyte has undertaken in recent months under Meury to recoup the billions of dollars in sales that it stands to lose once its aging blockbuster Jakafi® (ruxolitinib) loses patent exclusivity in 2028—one of the Top 20 Drugs Heading for the Patent Cliff through 2029, according to a recent GEN A-List.
Jakafi, marketed outside the U.S, as Jakavi®, generated $3.093 billion in net product revenues last year, up 11% from $2.792 billion in 2024. Jakafi finished the first quarter with $757.755 million in net product revenues, up 7% from $709,412 in Q1 2025.
Incyte has agreed to pay Star $1.25 billion upfront for Vega, plus up to $750 million in payments tied to achieving sales milestones.
The boards of Incyte and Star have approved the acquisition deal, through which Incyte will acquire all of Vega’s outstanding shares through a stock purchase agreement. The deal is subject to expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other customary closing conditions.
Incyte expects to incur an R&D charge of approximately $1.25 billion, to be included in third quarter and full year 2026 GAAP and non-GAAP results, as a result of the acquisition.
However, the benefits of an acquisition by Incyte outweigh its costs, Vega and parent Star Therapeutics reason.
“This milestone reflects our team’s deep commitment to innovation and underscores our strategy to develop first-in-class and best-in-class therapies for serious conditions with high unmet need,” stated Adam Rosenthal, PhD, Star’s founder and CEO.
The post Incyte to Acquire Vega Therapeutics for Up-to-$2B, Growing Hematology Pipeline with Phase III VWD Candidate appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
It didn’t have to be this way.
The condemnations keep coming four days after security officers escorted five diabetes experts out of the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans for handing out copies of an editorial criticizing federal cuts to biomedical research. Expelling the doctors and scientists has shocked people in the field, and the ADA’s communications explaining it have only made matters worse, leaders in diabetes research and practice told STAT.
WASHINGTON — Federal health regulators on Tuesday signed off on the first new sunscreen ingredient for the U.S. market in more than 25 years, giving Americans access to a skin-protecting chemical long used in Europe and other parts of the world.
The Food and Drug Administration says the ingredient, bemotrizinol, met the agency’s standards for protecting from dangerous ultraviolet rays while causing little irritation or absorption into the skin. The ingredient is safe for adults and children 6 months and older, the agency stated in a release.
Epigenetics is increasingly powering cancer diagnostics and liquid biopsies. These emerging private companies are spurring the market with structural DNA, fragmentomics, and DNA methylation tests.
Our understanding of the role of epigenetics in disease is growing rapidly, driven by rapid advances in sequencing technology and computing.
Epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNA expression can interact with genomic changes to cause cancer. Therefore, diagnostics can detect early signs of disease by screening for these epigenetic signals.
Players including Illumina, Agilent Technologies, and Roche Diagnostics are leading the global market for epigenetic diagnostics, which is expected to swell by 15.5% per year from $17 billion in 2024 to $39 billion by 2030.
Growth is being driven by the increasing affordability of genome sequencing; the integration of AI tools in data analysis; growing investments; and soaring demand for liquid biopsies—noninvasive cancer tests based on blood and urine samples.
One of the first diagnostics with an epigenetic component to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Exact Sciences’ (now part of Abbott Laboratories) ColoGuard® noninvasive stool test for colorectal cancer in 2014.
Since then, epigenetics diagnostics have already been generating M&A activity, with deals in the space including Cardio Diagnostics of the U.S. going public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Mana Capital in 2022; the takeover of Ireland’s EpiCapture by compatriot Trinity Biotech in 2024; the 2023 acquisition of Germany’s Epigenomics AG by U.S.-based New Day Diagnostics; and U.S. Agilent’s acquisition of Avida Biomed, also in 2023.
There is also corporate venture interest with giants like Illumina Ventures, the Labcorp Venture Fund, and Lilly Asia Ventures making investments in small startups.
Check out below for our take on the most promising privately-owned players in the epigenetics diagnostics space, based on their investor attraction and market potential.
1. Arima Genomics
Founded: 2015 | Headquarters: Carlsbad, California
Arima Genomics was spun out of UC San Diego and developed research tools to pinpoint the 3D structure of DNA in cells.
However, the company pivoted to cancer diagnostics after its assay discovered vital clues on how to treat a teenage girl with glioblastoma in 2022.
Arima’s Hi-C technology involves locking the DNA structure in place via crosslinking. DNA strands are then cut with enzymes and labeled with a marker called biotin. Arima uses a process called proximity ligation to connect DNA strands that were physically close together into a single strand, and then sequences the resulting molecule.
Last year, Arima launched a lymphoma test that is delivered via the firm’s laboratory testing service, certified by the U.S. Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) program. The test is designed to be used to help patient management by discovering gene fusions and rearrangements for 417 genes in different types of lymphoma.
The test helps to fill in the gaps left by the gold standard, fluorescent in situ hybridization, which can be time- and resource-intensive and lead to conflicting results.
Arima raised $22 million in a Series C round led by Illumina Ventures in 2025 and appointed a former venture partner from Illumina Ventures as CEO. The firm is using the proceeds to launch a pipeline of clinical assays in cancer.
Arima also closed a partnership with Fox Chase Cancer Center earlier this year to co-develop diagnostic tests for lymphoma and sarcoma.
2. DELFI Diagnostics
Founded: 2019 | Headquarters: Baltimore, Maryland
DELFI Diagnostics was founded on an “aha” moment at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine when a group of researchers aimed to overcome the high costs and low sensitivity of traditional liquid biopsies.
The breakthrough involved hunting for the certain way cell-free DNA fragments appear in the blood. Healthy cells and cancer cells package their DNA in different patterns, reflecting changes in the cell’s genomic and epigenomic machinery.
Using this method of “fragmentomics,” DELFI’s technology can tap into orders of magnitude more data than traditional methods.
DELFI’s product FirstLook Lung uses artificial intelligence (AI) and fragmentomics technology to screen a blood sample for signs of lung cancer. It is designed as an adjunct tool to check whether patients are eligible for lung cancer screening, and is regulated under the CLIA program.
The startup’s other product, DELFI-Tumor Fraction (DELFI-TF), allows pharmaceutical companies to track the effectiveness of a cancer therapy based on a sample of less than one milliliter of plasma.
Delfi raised $5.5 million in a seed round when it was founded, with investors including Menlo Ventures and Illumina Ventures.
The startup subsequently raised a $100 million Series A round led by OrbiMed in 2021, a $225 million Series B round led by DFJ Growth in 2022, and a $34 million debt round last year.
3. Element Biosciences
Founded: 2017 | Headquarters: San Diego, California
Element Biosciences was co-founded by three former Illumina employees who dreamed of democratizing access to genomic sequencing.
The company markets devices designed to sequence genetic information at a lower cost and higher performance than traditional next-generation sequencing. These include AVITI
—its flagship benchtop sequencer—and AVITI24, which can simultaneously analyze DNA, RNA, proteins, and phosphorylated proteins.
The company generated $25 million in revenue in 2023, partly driven by orders of AVITI.
The technology, based on a process called Avidite Base Chemistry (ABC), uses a dye-labeled polymer to bind genetic material and produce sequencing data with the need for fewer reagents than traditional sequencing.
Element is working with epigenetics specialists to boost their research offerings, including Dovetail Genomics and biomodal.
The company has also formed collaborations with diagnostics providers to enhance their offerings, including Revvity’s neonatal genetic tests and Medicover Genetics’ tests for hereditary cancers, metabolic and cardiovascular disorders, infertility, and neonatal diseases.
The company plans to market a clinical diagnostics-focused sequencing product called AVITI Dx, with EU approval expected this year in the form of a CE In Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) mark.
Element Biosciences has raised more than $680 million since it was founded, including a $277 million Series D round in 2024. The asset manager, Wellington Management, led the oversubscribed round, with participation from Samsung Electronics, Fidelity, and more.
This year, Element plans to commercialize a benchtop device, called VITARI, that can sequence a whole genome at high quality for just $100.
4. Nucleix
Founded: 2008 | Headquarters: Rehovot, Israel
Nucleix was initially founded to use epigenetics to trace falsified DNA in forensic investigations. Although the technology worked well, the management team decided to pivot to cancer screening.
Nucleix’s kits involve screening for specific cancer-linked DNA methylation patterns using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
The company also uses machine learning to construct biomarker panels best suited to the application of interest.
Nucleix’s Bladder EpiCheck® urine test is designed to detect the recurrence of bladder tumors based on changes in DNA methylation. It can also be used to support standard diagnostics when detecting bladder cancer in cases where malignancy is suspected.
The test has a CE mark in Europe and FDA 510(k) clearance in the U.S. for bladder cancer recurrence, meaning it can be marketed as substantially equivalent to another device in the U.S. market.
Nucleix is also developing a blood test for detecting lung tumors based on their DNA methylation signatures.
The company raised a $55 million funding round led by RA Capital Management in 2021, with participation from investors including BlackRock and corporate venture firm Lilly Asia Ventures. It followed up with a $22 million extension round in 2022.
In 2024, Nucleix sealed a strategic partnership with A. Menarini Diagnostics, part of the Italian Menarini Group, to bring its Bladder EpiCheck test to the European market.
5. Precede Biosciences
Founded: 2021 | Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
Precede was established by a team comprising Dana Farber Cancer Institute researchers and the venture capital firm 5AM Ventures.
Precede is developing blood tests that measure signals of disease based on the genomic and epigenomic characteristics of cell-free DNA shed into the blood by tumors.
For example, the company tracks gene transcription activity and DNA methylation based on as little as one milliliter of plasma. It can then use machine learning to interpret the results and predict the optimal treatment for each patient.
Precede collaborates with drugmakers to harness its technology to inform the development of next-generation radioligand therapies and antibody-drug conjugates, which depend on the knowledge of target expression and pathway activity rather than single genomic alterations.
The research-focused product Precede Bio Insight is designed to track the progress of cancer, with data spanning breast and prostate cancer.
The second product, Precede Bio Dx, also allows clinicians to select patients for clinical trials based on the blood test results.
The company emerged from stealth mode with $57 million in 2023, and followed up with a Series B round worth $83.5 million in January this year to fund the scaling of its technology as it gains commercial traction.
Among the B round’s syndicate were corporate venture investors Labcorp Venture Fund and Lilly Asia Ventures, and existing investor Illumina Ventures.
Jonathan Smith, PhD, is a freelance science journalist based in the U.K. and Spain. He previously worked in Berlin as a reporter and news editor at Labiotech, a website covering the biotech industry. Prior to this, he completed a PhD in behavioral neurobiology at the University of Leicester and freelanced for the U.K. organizations Research Media and Society of Experimental Biology. He has also written for medwireNews, Biopharma Reporter, and Outsourcing Pharma.
The post Beyond the Genome: Five Emerging Leaders in Epigenetics Diagnostics appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has predicted that, one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger. MIT Technology Review has learned of his latest step toward this: human tests of a “reprogramming” drug.
Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, plans to launch the tests in a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. The winners will “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function.
The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment.
Sinclair says he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers, in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.” Find out how he hopes to reverse ageing through chemical reprogramming.
—Antonio Regalado
—Will Douglas Heaven
At SXSW London last week, I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.
I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the top trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on several tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what’s going on in tech—and thus the economy—today.
Five key thoughts emerged: AI is everywhere all at once, it’s getting scary, a backlash is growing, it’s becoming a big deal for science—and I didn’t even need to show up at the talk. Read the full story for all the details.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has confidentially filed for a US IPO
The listing could come as early as September. (Reuters $)
+ OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. (Financial Times $)
+ The IPO will test investor appetite for AI companies. (WSJ $)
+ The move follows IPO filings from Anthropic and SpaceX. (CNN)
2 The US claims BYD, Baidu, Alibaba, and others are aiding China’s military
The Pentagon added them to a list of military-linked companies. (WSJ $)
+ The designations limit their operations in the US. (BBC)
+ The new additions also include humanoid firm Unitree. (TechCrunch)
+ The Pentagon is adapting to China’s tech rise. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Apple’s long-awaited AI overhaul of Siri is finally here
“Siri AI” promises to be a more conversational assistant. (NYT $)
+ It includes a standalone app and screen-reading features. (Reuters $)
+ And arrives after two years of repeated delays. (Axios)
4 The White House and Congress are working to limit state AI laws
A new deal would curb state rules for federal legislation. (Axios)
+ AI regulation has divided US politicians. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meta is launching a “workforce academy” for building data centers
The five-week program is free of charge and guarantees a job. (WSJ $)
+ It arrives shortly after Meta laid off 8,000 employees. (NPR)
6 Taiwan is mulling curbs on AI chip exports to China
The new controls would further align with US restrictions. (Bloomberg $)
+ Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Meta has quietly removed face-recognition code from its smart glasses app
The code identified by investigators has disappeared. (Wired $)
8 Humanoid robots are edging towards the battlefield
American and Chinese militaries are pursuing the tech. (BBC)
9 The world’s first wind-powered underwater data center has launched
It uses less power and water than land-based equivalents. (Guardian)
10 You could get some benefits of sleep without having to nod off
If new brain stimulation works as well on humans as on mice, that is. (New Scientist $)
Quote of the day
—Clara Shih, a former top AI executive at Salesforce and Meta, tells the New York Times that AI training can’t keep up with the field’s advances.
One More Thing
An embryo forms when sperm meets egg. But what if we could start with other cells—if a blood sample or skin biopsy could be transformed into “artificial” sperm and eggs? What if those were all you needed to make a baby?
That’s the promise of a radical approach to reproduction. Scientists have already created artificial eggs and sperm from mouse cells and used them to create mouse pups. Artificial human sex cells are next.
The advances could herald the end of infertility, but they raise major scientific and ethical challenges.
Read the full story on the new recipes for sperm and eggs.
—Jessica Hamzelou
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ These chefs turn Pop-Tarts into the desserts that inspired them.
+ A choir has beautifully transformed System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!”
+ Scientists finally traced crabs’ sideways walk in this fascinating study of evolution.
+ This nostalgic essay on the family computer is a touching throwback to early internet life.
Top image credit: Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Getty Images
Please send Pop-Tarts to hi@technologyreview.com.
You can follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks for reading!
—Thomas