San Diego-based Histogen CEO Gail Naughton is presenting encouraging preliminary results today at a stem cell conference from the startup’s first human trial of its hair regrowth treatment, ReGenica.
The company says it is in the midst of conducting a five-month clinical trial somewhere outside the United States to assess the safety of ReGenica. After 12 weeks, the company says, patients using the treatment show increased, thicker hair growth, with no adverse reactions. ReGenica is an injectable liquid product made by culturing cells from newborns and collecting growth factors, so-called wnt proteins, and other molecules that the cells secrete. In mice, wnt proteins are involved in triggering stem cells in the skin to form hair, according to Histogen’s press release.
About 25 subjects enrolled in the Phase 1 trial. They are all men, from 18 to 45 years old, with varying stages of male-pattern baldness.
Naughton is reporting the results at the 4th Annual Stem Cell Summit in New York. Histogen says its goal in conducting the study outside the country is to obtain human safety data for the under-the-scalp injections more rapidly, and thereby speed development of the product. Naughton told me in November her early focus is developing products for cosmetics, dermatology, and plastic surgery industries to generate revenue needed to support long-term development of living tissue skin grafts and other products.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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