[quote]It was NOT Cotsarelis who launched Follica. He transferred part of his interest in the “discovery” elaborated in his wounding paper to Follica, which was launched by Daphne Zohar as part of PureTech Ventures. Follica was an entity quickly set up as a vehicle for his “wounding” concept, but it is not his company.
Dr. Cotsarelis is (or was) a shareholder, and I believe a member of their medical advisory board, but he didn’t launch the company and does not run it. (Although, to be sure, the company sometimes does press releases and other announcements which vaguely suggest and imply that it is somehow “his” company, by somehow associating him with the day-to-day operations of the company. I believe that when they do that, it is purely for public relations reasons.)
I’m sure he made some money up-front, on the initial transaction with Follica, as well as still potentially standing to make more money if the continuing research ever does lead to a marketable treatment – but that is VERY far from sure. To be honest, I don’t think that Dr. Cotsarelis believes that Follica will come up with anything marketable at this point. Basically, he’s already made something on the initial deal 10+ years ago, so at this point, he probably doesn’t really have any more “skin in the game”. He’d be a fool to sit around waiting for them. I’d guess he has absolutely nothing to lose if they fail (if shares worth 0 now are worth 0 in five years or when the company folds, he’s not really out anything), and as we know he’s busy researching a VERY long list of other hair regrowth ideas.[/quote]
The specific genesis of the Follica company has limited relevance to my point. I was shorthanding that “Cots founded Follica” because he was in there from the beginning serving as the primary driving force of the research arm.
I know who Daphne Zohar is, and Follica’s backstory, just like many other longtime forum members here.
Yet the anecdotal picture has always suggested otherwise.
[quote]The whole scientific model of Follica is NOT to commercialize some procedure which simply dermabrades or wounds the scalp. If it were that alone, they would never get anywhere.
The whole model is based on finding some putative compound that COMBINED with wounding, would yield a lot of hair. Got that?[/quote]
I agree with this. Always have.
[quote]And still, to this day, after more than 10 years from Follica’s founding, there is still no public evidence they’ve found that compound. The one public trial of wounding in conjunction with some compound (in Germany) reportedly “failed”.
Bottom line – if “wounding” really could grow thousands of terminal hairs on a bald scalp – alone or combined with some exogenous compound – we’d all know it by now. [/quote]
I agree, there is no evidence that they have found anything commercially useful.
(But at the same time, I wouldn’t trust Cotsarelis to inform us until years later even if they had.)
The possible things to try for this (not just possible substances but possible protocols with them) is virtually endless. That’s the reality of it.
Granted, anything that works would almost certainly be something that was invented within the last generation or two. Any pre-industrial substance that did the job would have probably been discovered long ago - on that much we agree.
We’ve had basically one company seriously looking for this, for under 10 years now. And they are a privately-funded group trying for something commercially sellable in the near term. This topic deserves more manpower. A lot more.