New company dNovo

There are multiple scientific articles which seem to indicate that the hair inductivity problem during mass pass culture may be solved. Here is one of those articles.

What do you think, Roger? Is the loss of hair-inductivity during mass-pass culture problem solved?

Roger, I don’t think I said dNovo is injecting cells to grow hair I think I just said that if they are injecting cells those cells might not have to get inside the follicles in order to grow hair, as was established by Jahoda’s experiment when he grew hair on his wife’s arm. Jahoda did not get the cells inside of the follicles in his wife’s arm. Jahoda just got the cells in the vicinity of the follicles in his wife’s arm, and the cells cross-talked with the follicles in the vicinity and grew hair.

I don’t think it makes a lot of difference if Jahoda injected the cells or implanted the cells under the skin so when I say that dNovo MAY BE injecting cells, rather than follicles, I’m incorporating the possibility that d’Novo could be implanting the cells rather than injecting them.

But now that you’ve raised the specific issue that Jahoda implanted cells rather than injected the cells it may be more effective to implant the cells. For all I know Jahoda’s experiment wouldn’t have worked if Jahoda had injected the cells.

I also do not know if dNovo is injecting cells or implanting follicles. I’m just saying that dNovo might not have to work with entire follicles in order to grow hair. That’s my only point. I have no idea if they are or not.

One final point is that I know that Jahoda used cells taken right out of his scalp without culturing them. I’m also aware that if he had cultured the cells the experiment almost certainly wouldn’t have worked because the cells would have lost their original hair inductivity. But science has been working on the hair inductivity problem for some years now and they keep reporting that they’re getting closer and closer. I could be wrong but I suspect that by now science may have solved that problem by now.

Do you know for sure if science has solved the hair inductivity problem yet? And when I ask if science has solved the hair inductivity problem, I’m not talking about using iPS cells because a different team is working on that technology. I’m just wondering if science has solved the problem of mass-pass culture of hair induced cells without loss of hair inductivity. If science has solved that problem and dNovo can get access to that technology then I think dNovo would be smarter to just implant/inject the cells because Jahoda already probed that hair induced cells will grow new hairs. dNovo does not need to make new follicles if they can do mass pass culture of hair induced cells without losing hair inductivity.

@roger_that well said about hair direction, couldn’t agree more.

:clap: :clap: should I be excited over this? Their website doesn’t provide a lot of details but enough to get me excited.

No details on their patent pending technology. WTF

take a look at the mouse photo, I don’t see any issues with hair direction, the hair growing in perfectly uniform direction on the mouse.

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?

@LIG, No I don’t think they saw the mouse in person. Maybe the saw him in mouse, though. :slight_smile:

@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