Yes, I noticed. Best hair growing on mice I’ve seen from any of the researchers. This would suggest that they may be implanting follicles rather than injecting cells. If they got those results from injecting cells that’s even more impressive.
@jarjarbinx You make a lot of good points and I agree with just about everything you said. I think the key to understanding whether dNovo has really cracked the inductivity problem is, what does their cell reprogramming do? They are the first company to say that they are literally reprogramming the cells (not culturing existing cells or even going through an iPS cell step like Stemson Therapeutics). According to them this is something completely different. If reprogramming means changing one somatic cell line into another, without going through the pluripotent stem cell phase, then maybe they are resetting the cell line so that it starts anew, like brand new DP cells with full inductivity.
They have been intentionally vague about their procedure - because they admitted themselves they’ve been operating “in stealth mode” since 2018. That’s why we’ve never heard of them until now.
@Myhair1, regarding their pending patent - I’ve searched the US Patent and Trademark Office website’s database of patent applications, and found nothing that matches so far. However, patent applicants have the option to keep their application OFF the database - it is not mandatory that they make it public there - and in fact a lot of applicants do that, so the fact that I’ve found nothing matching so far doesn’t mean much. Here is part of the results for my search of “lujan and hair”.
@roger_that thanks for checking, you are obviously one of the most knowledgeable posters here, do you know how long it takes for the patent office to approve or deny a patent application
(roughy) ? Will this help predicting how long we have to wait before they start human trials?
@Myhair1 I would say around 2-3 years for something like this. (Rarely, patents can take much longer to be approved if there are disputes.) They wouldn’t necessarily have to get the patent before they can start clinical trials, though. Those are usually 2 separate pathways, unless some competitor sues for an injunction to prevent them from going ahead with the trials, and the competitor would have to make a very strong showing that something is being infringed.
Is dNovo moving into human trials anytime soon? I’m losing faith in Stemson to get their treatment into human studies soon and I’m losing faith in Tsuji to get his treatment to market ever. Tsuji grew hair on a rat years ago and he still isn’t in human studies. The below picture goes back to 2012. That’s 10 years ago. It looks like Tsuji has failed.
Stemson was “a few years away” from human trials back in 2019, we are in 2022 already and I think they are still “a few years away” from human trials.
DNovo’s only claim to fame is that they received $2.7M in seed money from Y Combinator, so my first question is how thorough did Y Combinator vett Ernesto Lujan’s work before forking out the money.
Had team members from Y actually seen the lab mouse in person or was this all based on some photo and paper documentation?
Is the above post a joke?
@roger_that @jarjarbinx do you know on what basis did Y Combinator approve the $2.7M funding to dNovo? What is it about about dNovo’s science that convinced Y that it is a legit start up? Just because Y gave funding to dNovo does not necessarily mean that the science behind the claim had been vetted properly.
I am pretty sure Roger, JarJar and many posters here are a lot more knowledgeable about hair research than the people at Y. What made you guys think that Y knew how to vet the science behind dNovo’s pitch?
@LIG Y Combinator is a major venture capital firm. I would think they have a tight procedure for doing due diligence. I understand they’ve been criticized for being too big and investing in too many companies, so yeah I guess it’s possible that they’re not giving enough scrutiny to some of their investments, but I don’t see any evidence of that here. If they relied only on a photo and some vague assurances, that would be clearly negligent to whoever’s providing the capital.
How would vetted it any better than the creators who are the top Doctors and researchers on the planet??
@Speck I think you misunderstood what @LIG is getting at. It’s like before a bank gives out a loan to a customer , the bank will do due diligence to see if the customer is credit worthy and whether he has any unpaid bills etc, so now the question is what due diligence did Y Combinator do to establish that dNovo is worthy of the $2.7M ? LIG’s concerns are not without mertis.
How and who would do the vetting? I’m sure these professionals had documentation to support their claims. If not, their website is a huge fraud. Hopefully, we will find out soon. When we see real hair growing on a live person then we will know for sure.
Who cares! They got the money already, it’s irrelevant.now. What’s important is dNovo’s plan going forward, what’s the next step and when can they start human trials.
1 Like
Correct! All the years I have been following this site, this seems to be a real solution! Stemson is too complicated and will be too expensive.
I understand why some people are skeptical of this.
Just remember the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. She claimed her technology could diagnose a whole range of diseases using just a tiny drop of blood. Silicon Valley venture capital firms gave her hundreds of millions of dollars. She became the youngest female billionaire ever.
Her claims were all based on lies and recently she was convicted on multiple counts of defrauding her investors. So silicon valley isn’t always right and sometimes their due diligence sucks.
Agree! This is either the real deal or a complete fraud. However, the doctors involved are not any joe blow. They are at the top of their field. Some of the latest studies show the reason for hair loss, stems cells move out and the hair follicle quits producing hair. Time will tell. If they bring it to phase one quickly and we see the same patch of hair on a human then most likely it is real. If they constantly postpone phase 1 then just another Follica.
EXACTLY. I remember Holmes’ story well. Besides, getting $2.7M in funding is nothing. To put this in perspective, Stemson received $15M and they are nowhere near the finishing line.
Roger, doesn’t LIG have a good point about dNovo only raising $2.7 million in funding? That doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me. In a way, it seems like Y Combinator would have authorized more money to dNovo if dNovo’s tech seemed feasible but then again if dNovo’s tech didn’t seem feasible Y Combinator wouldn’t have given dNovo any money.
What do you think about Y Combinator only authorizing dNovo a small amount of money?