As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”

Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.

For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”

For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)

New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.

Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.

As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.

Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.

Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.

It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.

“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.

The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.

According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.

Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.

The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.

That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.

The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.

Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.

The Return of the Numbers

Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.

Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”

While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.

“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”

The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.

A Signal Without a Sender

While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.

Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.

Aiming to tap into current dynamics where voice communications are regaining their importance, and with businesses reaffirming preferences for on-premise and hybrid strategies, Avaya has announced a mission-critical voice platform, Nexus, designed specifically for highly regulated environments such as public safety, healthcare, financial services and defence.

The latter are, said the enterprise comms software provider, sectors where communications failure can disrupt emergency response, financial operations or government services – in short, use case where reliability is becoming a defining factor in enterprise technology strategy.

According to research from Frost & Sullivan, nearly two‑thirds of enterprises continue to struggle with reliability, security and compliance concerns. As a result, half of all IT and telecom decision‑makers now rank these factors among their top criteria when selecting communications and collaboration providers. Survey data further showed that 83% of enterprises expect to retain some portion of their communications infrastructure on‑premise through 2028, driven largely by stringent security, reliability and compliance requirements.

The launch of Avaya Nexus is said to come as enterprises reassess how comms infrastructure supports artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workflows and crisis coordination, and the platform is said to focus on always-on resiliency, hardened security and integration with existing operational systems.

The platform is claimed to be built for always-on reliability, high-fidelity voice clarity and hardened security for organisations in mission-critical environments where voice communications downtime is not an option. Moreover, the company said it goes beyond what general-purpose collaboration platforms are designed to deliver, with a secure voice infrastructure and broader ecosystem integration through a cloud-native architecture and deployment flexibility.

“With the current macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges, organisations are prioritising data control and sovereignty,” said Elka Popova, connected work vice-president and senior fellow at Frost & Sullivan.

“The unified communications (UC) market is also becoming mature and more commoditised. In this environment, organisations are prioritising security, reliability and compliance to ensure consistent performance of their mission-critical communications infrastructure. Avaya is leveraging its proven enterprise voice heritage to deliver a zero‑downtime platform for regulated industries, aligning directly with the heightened need for trusted, resilient infrastructure.”

Avaya also believes that with the launch it is differentiating itself by addressing the specialised mission-critical infrastructure needs of regulated industries including healthcare, emergency services (public safety dispatch), financial services, public utilities, and government and defence. It sees Nexus as serving as a sovereign foundation for organisations that require “secure”, “dedicated” and “isolated” capabilities from a highly resilient service.

Another key point was to bridge the gap between on-premise reliability and AI modernisation, and to use its heritage in voice along with modern, open architectural principles to ensure agile, resilient and scalable offerings, and deliver an integration-ready open architecture. This approach, it assured, allows for flexible deployment in both cloud and on-premise environments.

Avaya Nexus uses application programming interfaces to connect voice with notification systems, radios and paging workflows, so organisations can modernise without sacrificing the operational control their critical voice communications environments require. It serves as the foundation for integrating advanced services such as AI for real-time keyword and action detection, voice authentication and analysis, instant transcription and translation, and bringing new value to mission-critical workflows.

“For the world’s most critical sectors, a dropped call isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s a crisis,” said Tony Lama, senior vice-president and general manager of Avaya Software. “Avaya Nexus isn’t a forced migration; it’s an evolution. We’re giving enterprises the high reliability that they have trusted for decades, now optimised for a cloud-native, AI-driven future.”