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Founded in 2008, Samumed has spent most of its lifetime working under the radar. It came out of the shadows in 2016 with a war chest of $220 million drawn from investors including Ikea’s private venture arm and some very wealthy individuals along with a pipeline of drugs it says can reverse aging.
“People label us as an anti-aging company sometimes, but we consider our platform to be ‘de-aging,’” Samumed CEO Osman Kibar told FierceBiotech. “That is, to actually restore youth, to go back to peak health.”
The San Diego-based biotech is targeting the Wnt pathway to create regenerative medicines that, in Kibar’s words, treat patients so they won’t be patients any longer.
Take Samumed’s lead program, lorecivivint, which is in phase 3 for knee osteoarthritis. There is no treatment for osteoarthritis that reverses damage to the joint, so doctors focus on managing symptoms: They prescribe exercise and weight loss to improve muscle strength and reduce burden on joints as well as drugs such as painkillers, anti-inflammatory meds and cortisone injections. Some patients may eventually undergo joint repair or replacement surgery.
Lorecivivint is designed to fix joint damage, so patients don’t need to go through all that.
A phase 2 proof-of-concept study reported (PDF) in 2017 tested the drug in one knee in 455 patients. If the patient had disease in both knees, the investigators treated the more painful one. One year after treatment, X-rays showed that a single injection of the drug increased the “medial compartment joint space width” in patients with osteoarthritis in one knee—in other words, it grew cartilage.
The total population—which included patients with disease in both knees—saw "clinically meaningful improvements” in pain and function scores, but those changes didn’t reach statistical significance. Samumed pointed out that this wasn’t unexpected, as these patients might feel “diffusion of sense of pain from the untreated joint” or put more weight on their treated leg, negating some of the treatment’s benefits.
Nevertheless, Samumed figures the data paint lorecivivint’s potential as a disease-modifying drug for osteoarthritis.
“If you look at other OA drugs, every single one of them is either a painkiller or an anti-inflammatory. But...