Vittorio Hernandez
Patients with Alzheimer's and dementia sit inside the Alzheimer foundation in Mexico City April 19, 2012.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido
There has been a spate recently of medical breakthroughs in the area
of anti-aging discovering, ranging from the use of metformin, a popular
diabetes medication, to pushing out toxic and worn-out cells, the senescent cells, which litters the body with aging.
Samumed, a single venture capital firm, claims it has invented drugs that would reverse aging. The firm has raised so far $220 million (AUD$287.7 million) on the selling point of reversing conditions associated with growing old, reports Fortune.
Samumed, a single venture capital firm, claims it has invented drugs that would reverse aging. The firm has raised so far $220 million (AUD$287.7 million) on the selling point of reversing conditions associated with growing old, reports Fortune.
These include male baldness, greying of hair, wrinkles,
arthritis, degenerated disc in spine and lung scarring, says Osman
Kibar, the chief executive of Samumed. Kibar, a Turkish migrant who has a
PhD in engineering, reveals that Samumed would attempt to seek a cure
on the leading cause of blindness and then target Alzheimer’s.
Kibar says the aim of the company, valued at $12 billion
(AUD$15.7 billion), is to regenerate the aging cells of people so the
cells could be as powerful as that of a developing foetus. Studies
carried by the firm has so far found the drug to be safe and could
regrow hair, ease pain and improve function for knee arthritis patients.
Samumed used to be Wintherix which was housed in a Pfizer
incubator. However, the Pfizer deal ran into trouble with the two
companies filing lawsuits against each other. In 2012, the suit was
settled with Wintherix gaining the right to the drug.
The medication targets a gene, the wingless integration
site, which when knocked out in fruit flies, prevents the growth of
wings. By triggering the right genes, or the Wnt pathway, old flesh
would be revived.
But hair-loss specialists were not impressed by the Samumed
presentation in March on results of SM04554, its anti-baldness drug,
wherein there was a 9.6 percent increase in head hair count for those
who used 0.15 percent of the solution and a 6.9 percent boost for those
who used 0.25 percent.
Findings for SMo4690, its arthritis drug, got more positive
feedback because patients scored better on how well their knees
functioned and there was pain improvement compared to those who took
placebo.
Samumed was recently included in Forbes’s first annual Global Gamechangers
list. It is a roster of the top 10 companies that are making
breakthroughs which could change the world in 2016. Besides Samumed, the
nine others are Illumina, Nvidia, Palantir Technologies, Spanx, Gilead
Sciences, Tesla, Novozymes, Serum Institute of India and GEMS Education,
reports The Telegraph.
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