For the coming newsletters, I will shed a light on health tech unicorns.
Here are the top 10 in the field of health, according to CB Insights.
This week, let’s take a brief look at Samumed, which has a top valuation in health sector.
| valuation | $12B |
| founded in | 2008 |
| area | regenerative medicine |
Samumed’s pipeline
What is attracting attention/money?
- anti-aging program
The company has several pipelines that aim to reverse aging.
The two most advanced pipelines are knee arthritis and AGA, a common form of hair loss.
In 2017, the company also announced a collaboration with L’Oreal to develop compound SM05253 for Anti-wrinkle skin care applications. However, they seem not to have announced any updates on this.
“People label us as an anti-aging company sometimes, but we consider our platform to be ‘de-aging.’…That is, to actually restore youth, to go back to peak health.”
Samumed CEO Osman Kibar for FierceBiotech (2019 Aug)
What technology do they use?
Samumed looks at regulating adult stem cells.
For tissue health, says Samumed, regulating the self-renewal and differentiation of adult stem cells is crucial. The failure can result in disease.
One of the primary signaling pathways to regulate is the Wnt pathway. Samumed thinks that if they can modulate the Wnt pathway, they can recover and restore the health of diseased tissues.
Their pipelines include knee arthritis, AGA(hair loss), as well as Alzheimer’s disease and oncology. I will follow up with their recent development, and whether they are living up to the hype.
In the coming weeks, I will also shed light on other health-tech unicorns on the list.
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Yuzuha Oka 