Samumed, a private company that’s racked up a heady valuation of $12 billion, has a potential timeline for when it might go public.
It’s possible the company could go public over the next three to four years, Samumed’s chief business officer Erich Horsley said at the UBS Global Healthcare conference on Monday in New York.
The company has already raised $300 million from backers including high-net-worth individuals and sovereign funds rather than a roster of venture capitalists. Its CEO Osman Kibar had previously said at a conference in 2016 that the company wouldn’t go public until it can get a product approved and start generating revenue.
Tapping into stem cells
The company’s pipeline contains a number of experimental treatments that offer the promise of reversing conditions related to aging by regrowing hair on balding heads, smoothing out wrinkles, and regenerating cartilage to worn-down joints in people with osteoarthritis.
That happens through technology that targets certain proteins that scientists think play a critical role in the development and renewal of stem cells, which give rise to other types of specialized cells, from eye cells to skin and hair cells.
Your body is equipped with something called progenitor stem cells. These cells are in charge of repairing and replenishing specific organs in the body. For example, a mesenchymal stem cell of the osteoblast lineage can go in and repair bone that’s damaged. That process has something to do with the WNT pathway, a set of proteins that tell these stem cells to spring into action.
“By dialing up or down various WNT genes or WNT processes, you can trigger any one of these progenitor stem cells down a certain lineage,” Kibar told Business Insider in 2017.
As we get older, our WNT levels start to get out of balance, Kibar said. Take the example of mesenchymal stem cells. “If the WNT activity levels can no longer increase such that it’s not making enough bone, now you develop osteoporosis.”
What Samumed hopes to do is manipulate the pathway that makes these progenitor stem cells spring into action, so that they don’t cause these diseases.
Samumed currently has seven clinical trials ongoing, two of which — one to treat a common form of hair loss and another to treat osteoarthritis — are ready to move into phase 3 clinical trials that could set them up for approval from the FDA.
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