This Silicon Valley startup thinks it can cure baldness. Here's how.

If you want to really cure hair loss, you’ve got to get to the roots — or at least the root cause.

That's the thinking behind dNovo Inc., a startup that's working on a way to cure — rather slow down or cover over — male pattern baldness. The company is developing a method of reprogramming skin cells so they can generate hair and replace the defunct cells that previously performed that function.

The San Jose startup's technology is still in its early stages, but the company has already seen some success with mice, Ernesto Lujan, its founder and CEO, told the Business Journal.

"We're really excited with the results that we've been able to demonstrate, and we're continuing to move forward," he said.

Hair roots grow in follicles, generated by stem cells, the body's foundational building blocks. When those stem cells die, are converted to other kinds of cells or become dormant, the result is hair loss. On a wide enough scale, the malfunctioning and death of hair stem cells can lead to male pattern baldness, an affliction that affects some 50 million U.S. men.

To date, the primary treatments for hair loss are drugs like minoxidil, which generally just slow down the process of hair loss, or hair transplantation, where follicles are surgically moved from one part of the body to another. Neither addresses the root cause of stem cell loss, Lujan said.

DNovo's system, by contrast, promises to do just that. The company is working on a way to transform skin cells into stem cells that can generate hair using a process called direct cell reprogramming. It then plans to take those cells and insert them into hair follicles. The hope is those cells will reactivate defunct follicles and spur renewed hair growth in them.

The company is still in the preclinical stage, and has several more steps to complete before its technology is approved for human testing, Lujan said.

DNovo's treated mice are growing hair

But dNovo is already testing its system on mice. Company scientists have generated stem cells and transplanted them to mice's backs, Lujan said. Within three weeks, the mice were growing hair, he said.

"Nine months after transplantation we still have these mice, and they continue to grow hair and have had no adverse reactions," he said.

Lujan became interested in cell reprogramming while studying genetics as a doctoral student at Stanford University about ten years ago. In 2018, while completing his postdoctoral studies at Harvard University, he decided to form a company focused on applying the technology.

"What I wanted to do was to find a problem that was not solved with current treatments and could optimally be solved with our direct reprogramming technology," Lujan said. "For this, hair loss was quite interesting ... If you have completely lost all your hair, it's largely incurable."

Late last month, dNovo raised $2.7 million in seed funding that should allow it to continue developing its system. Investors in the round included Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures, Soma Capital and Yintai Investment Company.

For Felicis Ventures, the investment was a no-brainer, said Niki Pezeshki, a general partner at the firm. Lujan has a strong technical background, cares deeply about the problem and has been working with cell reprogramming technology for years, he said. And the market for hair loss treatments is a huge one, he said.

"For us, it was a really high upside bet," Pezeshki said. "If it works, it would be a really amazing investment."