Samumed raises $438 million at $12 billion valuation

Samumed
CEO Osman Kibar, CFO Cevdet Samikoglu, and chief medical officer
Yusuf Yazici
Diana Yukari/Business
Insider; photos courtesy Samumed

• Samumed, a San Diego-based biotech is
  one of the highest valued healthcare startups in the US
  with a $12 billion valuation.
• On Monday, the company raised an additional $438
  million, bringing its total funding to $650 million.
• The company is working on treatments to regenerate
  everything from hair to cartilage.

Samumed, a private biotech that’s racked up the heady valuation
of $12 billion, just raised an additional $438 million at that
valuation.

The company is developing a pipeline of what could be
revolutionary treatments to regenerate hair, skin, bones, and
joints. The funding will be used to move those treatments further
along in development and potentially to approval. 

“We are now in a fortunate position to both move our later
stage programs to commercialization, as well as expand on our
earlier stage science and clinical portfolio,” Samumed CEO Osman
Kibar
said in a statement on Monday. 

The company had previously raised funding from backers
including high-net
worth individuals and sovereign funds rather than
venture capital. Samumed’s chief business officer Erich
Horsley
said in May that the company could go public in the next
three to four years. 

Read more: An
executive at $12 billion biotech startup Samumed just gave a
potential timeline for the company to go public

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.