More success for genetically engineered pig kidney transplants. Scientists might have found dark matter. Why space technologies and AI are converging. All that and more in this week’s Prototype. To get it in your inbox, sign up here .

A little over two years ago, biotech startup eGenesis hit a major milestone –one of its genetically engineered pig kidneys was transplanted into a living human for the first time.

This week, it announced more milestones . Not only have those kidneys found their way into five patients now, two of those patients have subsequently received human transplants. The results for one patient were published in the medical journal The Lancet . And now the company is about to embark on a clinical trial of more than 30 people in order to get a final approval from the FDA.

“This is hugely motivating for the field,” eGenesis CEO Mike Curtis told me.

Xenotransplantation–the use of animal organs instead of human ones–has generally been seen as a “bridge” by doctors, a way to keep patients alive until they can get a human organ transplant. This is particularly urgent for kidney patients, where there is an acute shortage of organ donations, who are otherwise treated by dialysis: where patients have their blood regularly cleaned by machine. That process creates other health complications and has a high mortality rate.

By contrast, Curtis told me, for the patients who got a pig kidney, months of independence from dialysis is “life-changing.” For one of the patients, he said, his kidney failure gave him extreme fatigue and required him to walk with a cane. The xenotransplant allowed him to exercise and improve his cardiovascular health before getting his new human organ.

That wasn’t a given. One concern about xenotransplants is that they might cause an immune reaction that wouldn’t allow for later human organ transplants. Thankfully, this seems not to be the case for the two patients.

eGenesis learned other things about xenotransplants with the first five patients, Curtis told me. It turns out that the immune response in people was different than what was seen in primate experiments, and the patients body’s started slowing attacking the pig kidneys. That meant they had to change what immunosuppressive medicines they used to prevent the organs from being rejected. This process worked, and now some patients have had pig kidneys for more than eight months. These medications will be used in the upcoming clinical trial, which aims to show that pig kidneys can keep patients off dialysis for at least six months.

Next up: The company is also working on genetically engineered hearts and livers, with a clinical trial for the liver starting in the coming months. For now, Curtis sees the company’s success so far as an important step to his goal of turning xenotransplants from a bridge to a permanent solution.

“Ultimately, we want to produce kidneys that last decades. We want to use minimal to no immunosuppression," he said. “With these first cases, we can already see in the data a path forward.”

Have Scientists Found Dark Matter?

Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Scientists know it exists , and that it makes up around 85% of the matter in the universe based on the way it interacts with gravity . But it doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic spectrum (hence “dark”) making it extremely difficult to understand what it’s made of.

A team of physicists running the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment might have finally caught a glimpse of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP)—one hypothesis for what dark matter is made of—according to data they presented this week at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference this week.

In an abandoned South Dakota gold mine is the Sanford Underground Research Facility , which contains a particle detector that uses liquid xenon to find particles moving through it. Being underground shields the detector from things like cosmic rays, making it more likely for scientists to catch stray particles of dark matter. An unusual collision was spotted within the detector, and after ruling out other possibilities for the signal, it was determined that there was only about a 0.5% chance it was caused by something already known. That probably sounds pretty certain to you and me, but is far from the gold standard for physicists, who require more certainty that something isn’t just a statistical fluke—about a 0.0000003% chance.

Right now, the strongest possibility is that what the scientists detected was a WIMP about 200 times the mass of a proton. That said, if it was, it had higher energy than expected . If it’s a typical WIMP, then the detector should have also seen other, lower-energy signals, which it did not. So it’s possible that this wasn’t a WIMP or it may have been a particularly unusual one.

To be clear, this was only one event, so it’s not enough to draw conclusions from. On the bright side, it came from a batch of about 200 days’ worth of data, and the scientists still have another 700 days of data to parse through, which might provide a better sense of what happened.

I don’t usually write about early scientific discoveries in this newsletter, but this is a particularly exciting result. So much of the “stuff” that the comprises the universe–dark matter and dark energy–has been hard for scientists to characterize. If we truly do get more evidence of what dark matter is made of, that could lead to profound changes in our understanding of the universe.

And that, in turn, could lead to big changes here on Earth, where those advances in knowledge could lead to technological applications we can’t even imagine right now.

The Hot Take: Space, AI and Defense Technologies Are Converging

Each week, I ask investors for their take on tech trends within their industries. This week, I talked to Mark Boggett, the CEO of Seraphim Space , which invests in companies developing new space technologies.

What space tech is being overhyped right now?

Small satellite launch as an investment theme . Launch is critical, but investors often overestimate how much value ultimately resides in launch providers themselves. Launch is becoming increasingly essential, but essential does not always mean highly profitable. The long-term winners may be businesses leveraging abundant and inexpensive access to orbit, rather than those competing to provide the launch service itself. Over the medium term access to space is set to become a utility.

What space tech trend should more people be talking about today?

The convergence of SpaceTech, AI and defence is still underappreciated despite becoming one of the most powerful investment themes in the sector. Space is rapidly evolving from a standalone industry into critical infrastructure underpinning national security, communications, logistics, navigation and intelligence. Governments increasingly require sovereign capabilities across Earth observation, satellite communications and positioning services, while AI dramatically increases the value extracted from space-generated data. This is creating a new generation of companies whose competitive advantage comes not from being in space, but from the mission-critical decisions they enable on Earth. We believe this represents one of the strongest long-term demand drivers in the sector.

What space tech trend are we all going to be talking about in five years?

The biggest conversation in five years will be the fusion of AI and orbital infrastructure . Space is becoming the world’s largest source of real-time data, while AI is becoming the engine that transforms data into action. Together, they create a powerful feedback loop. Future intelligence systems will increasingly depend on persistent Earth observation, ubiquitous connectivity and autonomous space assets. The real opportunity is not satellites or AI individually, but the emergence of an intelligent planetary operating system powered by both. Investors may ultimately view AI and SpaceTech as inseparable technology themes.

Anthropic vs The Pentagon, Week 27: Despite the court ruling that this was illegal, the Pentagon still considers Anthropic to be a supply chain risk, according to a post on X yesterday by Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. This was a day after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the AI company is “back on the right side.” The ambiguity continues.

Hiding From AI–In Plain Sight: An artist named Simon Weckert has designed patterns for shirts that prevent AI-powered cameras from detecting that a person is there. To do that, he installed a family of commonly used, open-source algorithms onto a camera and started working to find patterns it couldn’t detect.

The AI Job-pocalypse Has Been Delayed: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that while small-to-medium sized businesses have increased their levels of AI adoption, this hasn’t, for the most part, led to job losses. “[W]hile some firms have scaled back hiring due to AI, others have added workers to help them use it,” the report says. “Retraining employees in response to AI remains the primary way firms are adjusting their workforces.”

Cool Tech Alerts: Google has launched its newest AI model for global weather. Sierra Space has secured payload contracts for the inaugural flight of its Dream Chaser spaceplane. These computer scientists left OpenAI to build a cheaper, open-source alternative. A study found that GLP-1 drugs extend lifespans (in mice).

What’s Entertaining Me This Week

I’m currently in the middle of Paul Among The People by classics scholar Sarah Ruden. The book attempts to ground the letters of the Apostle Paul in the Bible’s New Testament to the time when it was written. Because of course, Paul wasn’t writing letters to people in the modern era, but those in the 1st century Roman empire. Ruden does a fascinating job of making it easier to understand the culture that Paul was reacting to, and why his own messages were so radical for the time. It’s helped provide a deeper understanding of some of the fundamental works of Western culture, though if there’s one thing I feel like it’s missing, it’s the particular context of the Jewish communities that Paul grew up with in Tarsus—I feel like that might have helped deepen the understanding of some of his points of view. Still, there’s no shortage of books addressing that, and I think Ruden did an excellent job of better contextualizing the culture that Paul was often addressing. It’s a really compelling read.