Samumed, SM04554

Samumed to Initiate Phase 3 Clinical Trials

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When it comes to a hair loss cure or groundbreaking new hair loss treatment, Samumed is one of the favorites to come out with something significant in the next several years. I have covered Samumed and its SM04554 hair loss product numerous times on this blog in the past. The product works via the activation of the Wnt signaling pathway and subsequent epithelial β-catenin signaling.

The company’s CEO Dr. Osman Kibar has been widely covered in the media, including a cover appearance on Forbes magazine in 2016. They also got publicity in 2018 in Business Insider after announcing plans to go public in 3-4 years.

Earlier today, reader “chris2” pointed out that Samumed is starting its final Phase 3 clinical trial for its SM04554 product. This news is provided in Samumed’s latest monthly newsletter (subscribe here). The best part of this story is that these trials will entail 625 patients, which is incredible. I do not remember hair loss companies ever testing their product on so many people in clinical trials. More often than not, they test on less than 50 human volunteers.

It is not surprising that Samumed can go all out with these trials. They have been valued at a massive $12 billion, and earlier this month, they received $438 million in new equity funding.

So in just this summer of 2018, we have received highly favorable news from: Samumed, Cassiopea, Histogen, RiverTown, Follicum, Organ Technologies/RIKEN/Tsuji. I hope Follica and Shiseido are next in line.

Brett Bolton, Hair Transplant

How does Dr. Brett Bolton do it?

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Recently, I went to youtube and did some searching for the most popular videos on hair transplants. To cover all bases, I ran searches on the following relatively synonymous phrases:

  1. “hair transplant”
  2. “hair transplants”
  3. “hair transplantation”
  4. “hair restoration”

For each of the above, I then sorted the results in order of view count. Lo and behold I got a major surprise.

The top 2 videos for all of the above phrases were both from a doctor named Brett Bolton, who practices out of Florida. Both videos were first uploaded in July 2013:

13 million views as of August 12, 2018:

9.2 million views as of August 12, 2018:

  • The third most popular video on hair transplants on youtube has 5.7 million views, and concerns reality/social media superstar Jeffree Starr’s hair transplant procedure.
  • Thereafter, around 15 “hair transplant” search related videos on youtube have between 1-5 million views.

Note that there are many hair transplant related videos with 1-5 million views that are on youtube, but do not show up for the specific keyword searches that I mentioned earlier.

Dr. Bolton’s Youtube Success

In fact, even Dr. Bolton has several other videos on hair transplants that do not show up despite having several million views. On Dr. Bolton’s blog and on his youtube channel, you can see 100s of his past videos. None are anywhere near as successful as the two that I embedded above.

How did Dr. Bolton get such phenomenal youtube success? On Yelp he only has three visible reviews. Even those three are from people without profile photos or any strong reviewing history. Essentially meaningless. Someone as popular as Dr. Bolton would surely have at least 50-100 Yelp reviews?

He has over several dozen other reviews on there that are hidden by Yelp. All those hidden reviewers also have no profile photos or any significant reviewing history.

Very strange, considering that on his own site, Dr. Bolton refers to the interesting “hair transplant society” site — where you can read 465 total recommendations from his past patients.

I know that many people purchase 1000s of fake youtube views and likes via websites such as Fiverr. However, Google and Youtube have both become fairly decent at detecting such fraud and penalizing websites accordingly. Millions of fake views, likes and subscriptions can surely not go undetected since 2013? I highly doubt Dr. Bolton would succeed via this method.

I have seen Dr. Bolton’s ads all over the internet in the past, but the links in those ads never took you to his youtube videos. So he could not inflate his youtube video view count in that way. Many other hair transplant surgeons also advertise daily via banners on the internet. Yet, none of them is getting anywhere near this kind of success on youtube.

I am curious about this whole phenomenon because:

  1. Anybody who is interested in getting a hair transplant will surely stumble upon Dr. Bolton’s super popular youtube videos early in the research process. I hope Dr. Bolton does good work, or else this is a very concerning prospect.
  2. If I could replicate this kind of 10 million plus video view success without getting penalized by Google/Youtube, I would become super successful in many different career fields.