Good morning. It's August 2.

Six peptides. Two days of hearings. One FDA panel that overruled its own scientists. If you've ever ordered BPC-157 online and wondered whether that was a good idea, this week has an answer - sort of.

The rundown for this week:

Let's get to it. 👇

A UK biotech's anti-aging gene therapy is still working in elderly dogs six months later - same muscle, energy, and quality-of-life gains as day one, no side effects. StockTitan

A pill designed to recharge your cells' batteries just proved it can reach the human brain - an early but real step toward treating diseases linked to low cellular energy. Longevity.Technology

New research says women can safely stay on hormone therapy well past 65 - so don't assume you have to quit at a certain birthday; it should come down to your own risk factors. Contemporary OB/GYN

A new therapy aims to actually reverse artery plaque, not just stop it from getting worse the way statins do - good news for anyone worried about heart disease down the road. Longevity.Technology

A new weekly injection just did something most liver drugs can't: it didn't just slow the damage down, it reversed it. In a clinical trial for MASH (an advanced, silent form of fatty liver disease), 6 in 10 patients saw their liver damage fully resolve within a year - and about half saw actual scarring improve, even the ones who barely lost any weight.

Why it matters: MASH affects roughly 1 in 20 US adults, usually with zero symptoms until it's serious. If you carry extra weight around your midsection, or a doctor has ever mentioned your liver enzymes were a bit high, drugs like this one could eventually turn a scary diagnosis into a manageable one - no crash diet required.

👉 Clinical Trials Arena | Fierce Biotech

For years, if you wanted BPC-157, TB-500, or other peptides beloved by biohackers, you had two choices: an unregulated gray-market website, or convincing a compounding pharmacy to make an exception. This week, the FDA took a real step toward closing that gap.

Over a two-day hearing, its Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee reviewed seven long-restricted peptides and recommended six - BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, Semax, and Epitalon - for its official compounding list. Only emideltide was rejected. The catch: the FDA's own scientists objected, saying the safety data is too thin, and several outside advisers who voted have financial ties to the peptide industry.

Why it matters: Supporters call this harm reduction - moving people out of the gray market and into a system with at least some prescriber oversight. Critics call it regulatory capture. Both can be true, which is what makes this worth watching rather than settled.

👉 PBS NewsHour | AJMC

Routine screening only exists for a handful of cancers - mammograms for breast, colonoscopies for colon, Pap smears for cervical. Pancreatic, ovarian, liver, and dozens of other cancers have no standard screening test at all, so they're usually caught only after symptoms show up - often once the disease has already spread.

None of this comes with a warning sign. Many of the deadliest cancers grow silently for years, with no clear symptom pointing back to what's actually happening inside your body - which is exactly why they're so often caught late.

Superpower's Galleri test, developed by GRAIL, screens for a shared signal across more than 50 types of cancer from a single blood draw - detecting tiny fragments of tumor DNA circulating in your bloodstream and flagging where in the body the signal is likely coming from.

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Telehealth company Hims & Hers had spent two years quietly building a peptide business, betting regulators would eventually allow products like BPC-157. This week's FDA hearing put that bet on full display: shares jumped 13% when the panel backed BPC-157, then reversed and sank 14% a day later when one of Hims' key products got rejected - its worst week in six months. Retail traders flipped from bearish to bullish within 24 hours; short-seller Martin Shkreli bet the other way.

The bigger picture: a multibillion-dollar public company's valuation now swings on whether regulators bless compounds its own customers already buy off gray-market websites. That says as much about where the peptide market stands as anything the FDA decides next.

👉 Fortune | Simply Wall St

Amid a week where a regulatory panel greenlit six peptides on the strength of demand, not data, here's a book from someone with the opposite instinct. Eric Topol runs Scripps Research Translational Institute and is one of the most cited physician-scientists alive - not exactly a hype merchant.

Topol's argument: real breakthroughs against heart disease, cancer, and dementia are finally arriving, but the field is also drowning in ‘extraordinary claims’ with billions of dollars riding on them. The book's whole project is separating the two.

No supplements to sell, no personal protocol to follow - just a clear-eyed read on which parts of the longevity boom are backed by real evidence and which are still just promising.

👉 Get Super Agers

I guess now longevity is your reason to go to that Korean BBQ 👇

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