155. Bad Hairdo to Good HairDAO: Andrew Verbinnen on Reversing Hairloss Through Decentralization

Andrew theoretically, when you have a slick bald scalp, the hair follicles are still probably there. They're just hyper miniaturized to the point where they're not actually strong enough anymore to pierce through the scalp and be cosmetically visible.

Karl Hey, Erum. What's going on?

Erum Oh, Carl. So much. I know you're headed up to Boston next week for a Ted talk with Ted Boston. Tell us more about it. It sounds like there's going to be a lot of people we know and topics that are very important to our listeners.

Karl Yeah. So everyone who listens to the Grow Everything podcast, where we focus on biologies technology, we'll know that the planet and sustainability and biomanufacturing and biotech, these things all work together. So I was invited to speak at TedX, which is going to take place at MIT. It's a three day conference. speaking the second day,on Sunday, November sixteenth, as part of a group that is called Bio [00:01:00] Fabricating tomorrow, microbes, mycelium, and new designers. And there's actually a number of people who've been on the podcast and that friends of the podcast that are going to be there. So Julia marsh of sway speaks earlier in the day, which makes sense since this is really going to be about planetary action. What are we doing to improve the health of the planet? And then the section that I'm in, it's called a block. It's called bio fabricating. Tomorrow is going to be hosted by our friend Dan Grushkin, who's been on the podcast and then two other podcast friends, Ginger Dozier of Bio Mason and Bio Consortia. She's going to be speaking. And then Christopher Mason of Cornell Weill, who's been on the podcast to talk about space. They'll also be speaking. So it's a good group of people, and I feel super humbled to be a part of that. It's taken up a lot of time and it's going to be very much a lot of fun.

Erum Oh yes, I'm very excited for you. I'm excited for their audience to hear from not only you, which They can also hear from you on [00:02:00] the podcast, which is great. So definitely give a shout out Carl. That's part of your homework. And then of course, our friends Ginger and Chris and Julia and Dan excited to hear how that goes. But yeah, good things happening.

Karl Yeah. And you have a special day coming up. It's going to be your birthday soon.

Erum Oh, yeah, I know. Well, that should have been top of the news, but just kidding. Yeah, I know, it's not like a big milestone birthday, but nonetheless,

Karl every.

Karl Birthday is a milestone.

Erum That's true, that's true. I should appreciate it more. but I think, at this time in my life, I'm really focusing on self-care. mind, body and soul. You have to treat it well. It's hard to do. It takes practice. So my birthday, I'll just be spending, at the QC Spa in Governor's Island. So for anyone in the New York area, I recommend that place. It's cool. It can get busy on the weekends. But anyway, it's very nice all day. just relaxing. I'm going to bring a good book and, think about all the things that are going on in life. [00:03:00] And also they have wonderful products too, of course. And, you know, we've been looking at biotech beauty products and to be able to see what they have the latest and greatest. It's also nice to shop while you're using their products, which is interesting. and yeah, so I'm really excited for my birthday. And just learning new things about wellness I think is very important.

Karl Yeah. I mean, I think it's been kind of a one of the underlying themes. We talk a lot about personal care and beauty and how biotech can, impacts those we have had. I feel a few people talk about wellness and wellness is, an extension of personal care and beauty.what else are you doing? Like you went to a wellness cafe this week. What was that like?

Erum Yes, a wellness cafe, it was in Soho. So of course, they have very unique experiences. Variances. And I thought this place is called one third Spring. And my friend Ray had shared it with me. It's very beautiful. They have very intentional products there from, you know, obviously perfumes. they actually [00:04:00] had a mouth fragrance.

Karl Yeah. What is that, a mouthwash? Such a fancy name for a mouthwash.

Erum It's more of a mouth spray. So for those who ever tried binaca and you just go, you know,spray it in your mouth. a little bit on the pricey side, but I loved the marketing around some of these products, and they have, like, everything you kind of would want to have a nice wellness experience. So they had books, they had wellness games, they had journals, teas, drinks, things that you can get that help nourish your body and soul. And they had a cafe as well. So they had unique foods, like carrot steamer, which is like a warm carrot drink. And it was. It was good. It was good. I said to taste like health. But it was, I liked it and. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of great marketing happening there. That was my big takeaway, Carl. So I took pictures of how they positioned products and a lot of those products I mentioned intentional when I talked to one of the curators of the space, and I was like, oh, this perfume is really good. he was like, [00:05:00] well, this is a functional perfume. So when you wear it, to wear it in the morning. And we, have a whole meditation that goes with it to create a scent memory. And these are neuroscience. And I'm like, okay, interesting. And then in my mind I was thinking, I haven't been using perfume correctly this whole time. Like I haven't been creating scent memories. I mean, of course I think it happens naturally. But again, to be intentional and to have these scents which are very beautiful smelling scents, I shared them with you and they're like designed to like kind of last longer. which sometimes if you have different scents, they're fleeting. But these scents are meant to be there all day, to be uplifting, like each scent had a mood associated with it. Again, a meditation associated with it. How to use it. I was like, wow, I love this journey, this like consumer journey. I'm going on with these perfumes. And so.

Karl I don't know, it sounds like marketing to me.

Erum It is exactly my point. It's like don't even know what the term [00:06:00] is. is this you know, functional marketing or you're like onboarding people to your experience and having them behave differently with their product or behave more intentionally with your product.

Karl You know, what this says to me is like this thing we talk a lot about in terms of like So many of us live our lives digitally, and there's like a whole cohort of people who are trying to disconnect, but it just increases the importance of in real life experiences. And so that's what this speaks to. in terms of this form of marketing where it's like it's way more intentional, you have to be there to experience it. If you think you're going to get that same experience digitally, you're not going to get it. So like this.

Erum Yes. And I like time was slipping away. I was late for our meeting. I'm so sorry. Because I just got captured, in this space. I just could not, like, I could stay there all day and, like. And I bought things. So doing things right. they were a little pricey, but I was like, oh, you know, treat yourself.

Karl You know.

Karl It is your birthday.

Erum Yes.

Karl And I mean, you know, this.

Karl All speaks to, you know, there's a lot of money in [00:07:00] longevity.

Karl this whole idea of lifespan and, keeping people alive longer, but having a better life while you're alive? it's a huge market.

Erum Yes, absolutely. it's very interesting space for us, Carl, because we look at biopharma and pharmaceuticals in general and how pharma has been developed to treat disease. And we also work in the consumer world, where we see products that are focused on wellness and longevity, like you mentioned. And then there's this blurring between the two. And I'd like to point to GLP one, for example, where that was a product developed for people with diabetes to treat a disease. But then it kind of flipped to become a product to help people lose weight, which, yes, aesthetically, maybe people are taking it, but it's also if you lose weight, you also prevent a lot of disease or reduce the risk of getting disease because you've lost weight. And that's a longevity play there. And, I like to think about this. and we talked about this all the time is that, you know, for pharma to [00:08:00] consider making more longevity therapies is actually more lucrative for them, because if they keep people alive longer, they have a longer lifetime value. So now we're talking about business speak. And if they need to use those drugs or molecules to be able to live longer and buy it their lifespan, then you make more money that way. You know, if they die, you're done. You're not making any money off that person anymore. So I don't know if that sounds morbid, but I think in terms of business it's like, okay, yeah, I do want to help my constituents, my customers live longer so I can provide for them longer. And, you know, and that they're happy with the products and services that I'm creating. Right?

Karl Obesity has so many knock on effects that people don't even think about. They just think about, obese people. But it's very unhealthy. It causes depression. And as we're recording this, the Trump administration announced that they did deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to lower the cost of GLP, so making them much more accessible. [00:09:00] And they are finding that these drugs not only help with obesity. But there's a lot of health associated benefits associated with these drugs. So I think it's super interesting, that, something I think the person who I first saw talking about this was Scott Galloway, talking about how GLP one are more important than ChatGPT. and seeing that the administration is lowering the these things just makes me go. It's a really interesting direction to be going in, and I just wonder if pharma also sees it as okay if we can start to think about longevity. This is an area where we can, continue, not just cure disease. That's one thing. But if we can like keep people healthy longer, this is a good market for us. We have yet to see that. But today we're going to talk about hair longevity.

Erum Yes. there's longevity for a lot of different parts. We talked about skin longevity. I haven't heard much about longevity or other types of longevity, but hair longevity is what we are talking about today.

Erum So tell me more about hair longevity. What is that? Karl?

Karl Okay, so.

Karl it's funny that we're recording this [00:10:00] today. I just mentioned the Trump administration, and GLP one, but biotech investors are also interested in hair loss treatments. As we recorded this, two startups pillage pharmaceuticals and Aerodynamics raised a combined two hundred and seventy million dollars to develop treatments for a common form of hair loss, which is androgenetic alopecia, which is, natural hair loss. And the markets for hair loss are pretty big. Over the counter is like a four billion dollar market and alopecia, which is you have to take a prescription drug for is a nine billion dollar market. So these are really big markets. And to me, it's no surprise that, investors are looking at this because the markets are big. People are aging. People want to look good as they get older, as they increase their health span. And so, I think that sets up really nicely. The person talking about our guest today.

Erum Yes, yes. And now we know why our guest is going after this market. Our guest is Andrew Verbinnen of HairDAO, which [00:11:00] I'm so excited. We finally have Andrew here because we've talked to many organizations that have created DAOs and hair Dao being I think one of the more for me prominent in terms of it's really focusing on a very specific thing, right? We've seen, vida del molecule Dao. Athena Dao and they have, a lot of different, target areas. Perhaps you can say they have specific working groups within their DAOs, but Heyerdahl's really focused on hair. And for all the reasons you just mentioned. hair Dao is a vertically integrated, patient led biotech combining a thriving online community and an in-house high throughput lab with their own telehealth platform called Anogen. And And Andrew Verbinnen, who we're speaking with today before Hair Dao. He was a cryptocurrency investor and he managed a fund called Foster Cove Capital. And to top it all off, he was born and raised in [00:12:00] NYC, so he is a brother from another mother. You will get to hear Andrew talk about all of the amazing things that have brought hairdo together, all the amazing business models, science, technology and community. So let's let Andrew take it away.

Erum Andrew Verbinnen. Welcome to the Grow Everything podcast. We're so happy to have you on. Finally.

Andrew Thank you for having me.

Erum Yeah, yeah. And we missed you last week because we had a little happy hour to celebrate our one hundred and fifty episodes. Onia your CTO attended, where were you? Why didn't you show up?

Karl Yeah, dude. What happened?

Andrew That is a very good question. We we had a pop up in Washington Square Park, so I was on my feet all day long, and I think I got a little bit tired. By the time that happy hour came around. Ionia was busy making sure our whole website runs appropriately, but she was sitting down all day, so that probably gave her a little bit more energy.

Erum Yeah, she was there and it was great to see her representing HairDAO and let's get [00:13:00] into it. We're so excited to finally have you on. We've had DAOs or people representing DAOs on the podcast before, and let us kick it off. You know, we know you're someone who's been studying government. You've worked in private equity, then crypto, then biotech via hairdo. First tell us what is a DAO.

Andrew Yeah. So technically a DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. I think that's actually a misnomer. That's largely held the space back for a while, because I think there's so much emphasis on this aspect of DAOs that it typically means there's not really a leader or true core group of people who really hold ownership in terms of driving the progress forward. And and so it's, oh, it's decentralized is typically kind of a, an excuse that I think allows people to shirk responsibilities in a way that they wouldn't if it were a more traditional or formal company. So the way I think about DAOs, think it's just people recognize the term DAO now, but I really just think of it as like an on chain company. [00:14:00] And I think the real innovation is not necessarily its decentralized nature, but is the open source nature that you wouldn't get with a traditional company where you're actually able to leverage sort of by being open source, you're able to leverage like a broader community of people who can contribute work, who can be your customers who sort of allow for a feedback loop to happen between when you put out a product and the customers using that product and giving you feedback. sort of speed up that feedback loop, if you will. So I view it as an on chain company that you're able to leverage the open source nature, you're able to get a lot more leverage because you have a broader community that's sort of contributing to you.

Erum Perfect. And then I'll just ask this follow up question. So and that leads me to ask, why did you get into hair loss with the DAO.

Andrew Yeah. Great question. So I think the first and easy answer is that I've suffered from hair loss myself, for a while. I'm twenty nine years old now. I would say when I was about it was my freshman year of college, so I was probably about nineteen when I was waking up seeing a bunch of [00:15:00] hair on the pillow. That was a major freak out for me. It was much more emotional than I thought it would be. And I think ultimately when I really think on it, I think what really got to me was it was the first time I was coming sort of face to face with my own mortality. It's like you look in the mirror and you're like, whoa, I look like I'm aging. I look like I'm getting older. And so that was a very, troubling period for me. then I started thinking, okay, this is hair loss. This shouldn't be like that. Hard of a technical problem or a biological problem to solve is sort of this, like dead keratin that sort of hangs outside of our body. Seems like it would be low risk to sort of be able to fix that. Seems like there'd be a lot of innovation in the space, and all I was able to find was minoxidil which essentially did nothing for me, or finasteride, which, I've been on since I was twenty years old, so about nine years. And it was it's been helpful, but it really didn't actually do much, for my hairline. And so I ended up getting a hair transplant as well. Uh, so if my hair looks good today, It's because of all that. And then in terms of why, you know, why did I start [00:16:00] a related to hair loss? I think it's because, I view crypto in general as one of the best tools in the world for incentive alignment. And I think that, first off, hair loss is not classified as a disease. It's a cosmetic condition. And so when the NIH is determining what they fund and they fund the overwhelming amount of early stage research, if something's not classified as a disease, it's going to get almost no funding, even if there's a really big patient community that cares about it. And so I think the best use case for DAOs in terms of DeSci is filling this void between an indication where there's a large group of patients that really care about solving something, and then where there's a total lack on the supply side of nobody really funding new innovations. So I think the last time we looked at the data, there was only about five million dollars being spent globally to do basic research for androgenetic alopecia, and based on the amount of money that hair dyes raised, the amount of studies that we're doing, we've already about doubled the sort of global output of early stage [00:17:00] R&D into androgenetic alopecia specifically. So I think it's paying dividends already.

Karl Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, and you look for our listeners who are not looking at our video, you look like you have a very healthy head of hair. it looks really great. Sorry you had to go through that experience. you know, you mentioned and you talk about realigning incentives in R&D, which I think are super important. And you specifically mentioned, androgenic alopecia being underfunded. Could you talk about what androgenic alopecia is? We happen to know what it is because we worked with the Chinese company that had a hair product that we can talk about at some point. And how did you arrive at this idea that a Dao or a token, along with a community, could really change how science gets funded.

Andrew Definitely. So. Androgenetic alopecia is your standard male female pattern hair loss  you see, sort of like the recessions on your temples and then maybe the bald spot at the top, the crown of Your Head. and then it sort of just expands throughout entirety of the scalp. It's the most common [00:18:00] kind of hair loss, by far. It makes up about ninety five percent of total cases of all hair loss. but again, it's seen as more so a part of the aging process and it's seen as cosmetic. so it receives very little funding. And this is in contrast to other types of alopecias, like alopecia areata, where your immune system attacks the hair follicles, and that is classified as a disease. And actually, as a result, even though a much smaller subset of the population deals with it, it gets a lot more funding. There's a lot more research going on at Pfizer and these big pharma's to solve alopecia areata, for a bunch of reasons. In some cases, it might just be because there's overlap with other drugs that they're already funding immunosuppressants or in a lot of cases, to it's because it's covered by insurance. and so there's sort of a bigger payout at the end of the rainbow, if you will. so that is the gist of androgenetic alopecia. We don't obviously understand a lot of the full mechanisms, but the best explanation for what really causes it is DHT binding to your hair follicles and gradually miniaturizing them over [00:19:00] time. So with each cycle of the hair follicle, and I would say that's like the most upstream mechanism of action for stimulating androgenetic alopecia. We're obviously looking for, downstream mechanisms, which would, if we could tweak those, would have a better side effect profile than sort of just like, nuking your DHT, which is a lot of the strongest hair loss drugs like finasteride or dutasteride currently do. and I think an important thing with male female pattern hair loss. And it's critical for our mission, which is to be able to turn a slick bald scalp fully hairy at some point in the future. but these hair follicles miniaturize with each life cycle, which can be two to six years. And theoretically, when you have a slick bald scalp, the hair follicles are still probably there. They're just hyper miniaturized to the point where they're not actually strong enough anymore to pierce through the scalp and be cosmetically visible. so yeah. And so then onto the token side of things and why me and my co-founder, whose name also happens to be Andrew, figured, that token would be a great option. So obviously, we were both [00:20:00] involved in crypto. We were both investors in the space. and I think we just got really discouraged by the fact that it seemed like a lot of people weren't necessarily launching tokens, in the way that sort of like maximized their use case, which is ultimately to align incentives. And so I think if you look throughout crypto, you'll see a lot of these. And it's because of the sort of regulatory scrutiny that was on the industry. But there's a lot of these very, contorted legal structures with a lot of these companies where you'll have sort of an equity vehicle that accrues all the value of what's ever being done, and then kind of this useless token that's given out to the community. And I think our vision was, what would be possible if you were able to align sort of investors, a core team and the broader community behind one asset where you all want this one asset to go up. And I think from our standpoint, particularly because we leverage a lot of our best ideas come from anonymous people in our discord server. The best way for us to do that was via a token. You know, we couldn't be issuing these micro, micro issuances of equity to anonymous [00:21:00] people around the world. And so I think when you have an online native community, a token is really an online native tool versus sort of these more archaic at this point, other sort of, financial instruments.

Erum Thanks so much for that. It's really interesting to see how this is all playing out. And specifically, you mentioned that, conventional pharma views hair loss as a cosmetic issue. Right. You mentioned that. And your white paper says greatly reduces the incentive and capital flow because it's a cosmetic issue. It's not a pharma model. So how does hair dye reframe the condition and the market such that solving it becomes not just a vanity play, but a serious biomedical condition?

Andrew Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think just stepping back. So the our biggest innovation at hairdo has been the fact that we've been able to drive the cost down of early stage R&D dramatically. So we've been running studies with a bunch of universities. and we would get results back in approximately one to two years. And the study, all in all, was [00:22:00] costing us about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Largely, this is because of inefficiencies and bureaucracies that exist at universities. And so by in-housing the same experiments we were running with these universities, we were able to drive the cost down per study to about six thousand dollars, and we're able to get results back in about a month. and honestly, it's a lot of common sense innovation. It's no like major technical breakthrough. so because we've sort of sort of now innovated so much. And just to step back the model that we've innovated on is the human hair follicle organ culture model, which we think is a super unique model, because it's a fully intact human organ. And because of that, I think you get a much more representative preclinical model than what a lot of other people are using. And so a lot of other people will use single cell models, which aren't very representative of what happens in the body because cells talk to each other. And then on the flip side, a lot of people will use mouse models, which also aren't very predictive because they're mice, not humans. And I think if you just do a quick Google search, you'll see that we've solved hair loss in [00:23:00] mice a million different times,

Karl right?

Andrew you know, we still haven't figured it out in humans. and so I think what we've actually stumbled upon is the human hair follicle model being a super, super good model, not just for studying hair loss, but for studying, actually just how fully intact human organs will react to certain stimuli. And so I think we have a bunch of repurposed drugs that we're obviously testing for hair loss. because I think that's a great way to develop drugs more quickly that people can use to treat hair loss. But we also have a broad array of gene targets that we have identified as being critically important to the the reversal of the hair loss process. And a lot of these gene targets have obviously overlap with other conditions like prostate cancer being one of them. so I think this is a way the hair follicle organ culture model is a way to actually really quickly scale a really broad and proprietary unique data set of human mini organ tissue that will be super unique to what anybody else out there has. And I think once you've sort of [00:24:00] created this big data set of how human fully intact tissue reacts to certain stimuli, you can then really sort of quickly start to piece the puzzle together, so to speak, and see where there might be overlap with other conditions.

Erum Yeah. That's amazing. I just wanted a quick comment, because I came to visit your offices in Jlabs and saw your lab set up. It's amazing. And I triple underscore the whole research, high throughput side of it. I remember learning about it And I'm like, okay, you guys have a follicle guy. You guys have a follicle guy where you saw some follicles and you get to work and it's amazing. Yep. 13:49

Andrew it's kind of insane because so we we're very lucky. We have an amazing chief medical officer, Doctor Blake Bloxham. He's awesome. He's based out of Long Island, does a great hair transplant. If anybody if anybody is in the market for one. but he also is able to, you know, if, say, there's doing a transplant of three thousand hair follicles or something like that, he's able to get us, with the patient's consent, obviously, ten to twenty hair follicles, something like that, which we can then test on. And you wouldn't expect [00:25:00] it. But this is currently for a lot of the major labs. A massive choke point is supply of hair follicles. And so there have been some stories of, very prestigious researchers who, you know, the study gets delayed because they have to get on a plane to Portugal to go see a hair transplant doctor who will give them hair follicles there before flying them back. You know, smuggling the hair follicles, so to speak. back on the plane, across country borders. and so this kind of thing, like, obviously it really delays research, by months, three months, something like that. And so we're very lucky to have, quite frankly, at this point, more follicles than we know what to do with. butUm, you know, the follicles are not the choke point for us now. It's actually the throughput, of going through the model.

Karl That's amazing. you know, one of the things you said as we were, you know, in our pre-call, was that your biggest innovation or your coolest innovation is this ability to drive down the cost of research and also accelerating it. But I wonder, how do you guys make a decision, you know, in terms of like what you are going to research, how did you [00:26:00] guys decide what was going to be your first IP NFT, how did your community vote on that? and what trade offs did you guys have to make, let's say management versus what the community wanted?

Andrew Yeah. Great question. so I would say the first IP NFT, the way we made that decision is very different than we've made subsequent decisions. so the way we made the first decision was we were working with the most cited hair loss researcher in the space. He's really awesome. He has a great, research organization as well outside of the university he works in called, but he sort of had this idea. He said, this is a great low hanging fruit, for a drug that I think that will work, and that we can ideally get to market really quickly. And so I think it was a great proof of concept. it was our low dose thyroid hormone topical treatment for treating hair loss, which we do sell currently on anagen.xyz. and he said, you know, he was the expert at that point. He had done this, you know, the model a million times before. And we really wanted to see the end to end process. so [00:27:00] anyways, the community was really excited by the idea of working with him. He's the most cited hair loss researcher in the world. So everybody voted yes on this. And for clarity, the way we do all of our votes, the way we make the decisions of how we fund any study, is actually via a hair token vote. it's not like this purely democratic process where it's like one person, one vote, it's actually one token, one vote. for us, at least, that makes more sense, because, if you hold more hair tokens, you have more skin in the game. And so you should have more say whatever the research is. that's how we made that decision, in subsequent sort of decisions that we've made. And I think this is key to how we've actually driven the amount of the cost per study down is we have a much higher throughput of ideas, coming our way. So in a traditional lab, right, maybe you have like five or six researchers. they're all limited by time and really ideas. how many new ideas does a researcher come up with. And even if they are coming up with, you know, a new idea, they have to go write this long grant, they have to, [00:28:00] you know, submit the grant. They've got to do all this paperwork, actually, to just get to the point of running the study. We have an online discord server of two thousand people. And so we get a lot more ideas sort of pushed our way. and also we have the money too, so there's no grant process. It's a token vote. Do we want to run this or not? and if people vote yes, we go run it. and then obviously too, because we brought the cost down so much, it used to be a much more deliberative process because it's like we're debating, should we spend two hundred thousand dollars or not? Now we're debating should we spend seven thousand dollars? It's a much. You're willing to take a lot more risk, obviously, when the when the price comes down that much. So that's how we do it. But it's you know, it's on snapshot and it's a one token, one vote is how we decide what we're what we're funding.

Erum Yeah. Wow. There's a lot of layers here because you're building, governance, architecture, a treasury token, incentives, research or oversight, and decentralized R&D network. There's a lot. So you're operating these layers on the science side, community side, code side. How do you [00:29:00] personally manage the tension between those layers?

Andrew I think the way we've done it actually, now is we have a really strong team. we delegate and we have people who are best at certain things. And it's important to sort of like you know, when somebody is working on something, just trust them to them cook, trust them, let them really take ownership and manage of that. And so to the extent that we have a very flat organization, sort of the goal because we are you know, our goal is to be fully verticalized end to end pharma from from early stage R&D, to the D to C anagen. XYZ like brand where we're actually selling treatments to patients online. and that's a pretty, broad array of things that we're doing. And it's also a pretty broad array of just skill sets required. so I think to the extent that we can stay a flat organization, that's, kind of how you manage it, because no one person can manage the lab and the telehealth. It's like different things,

Karl Yeah. I mean, I think kind of a follow up to that is like, you've got this ecosystem here now is this ecosystem. It's patient. It's researchers, it's investors. It's you guys [00:30:00] as operators, you're all interacting with each other. Like what has been really the most surprising thing that's come up. that you look at that either benefited or was negative, having this disparate group of people together.

Andrew I one hundred percent underestimated the skill of the online researchers. when we got into this, we were thinking, okay, our job is to go out and find the best researchers who are at universities and fund their work and sort of tell us, hey, what do you guys think? And I think this is more true in hair loss for sure, than a lot of other industries. But because the space has been so underfunded by traditional channels for so long, the people who have been working on this now for ten to fifteen years are just people who were twenty five years old and they started losing their hair. They took it personally, and then they proceeded to deep research for the next fifteen years. and so I think what I didn't expect was to very quickly graduate from saying like, hey, experience [00:31:00] researcher, what study should we run to us actually going to researchers and saying, we don't have a lab yet. This is our idea. This is the study design. Can you just essentially be the lab hand for us because we don't have the physical space? And so we got to that point very quickly where the study proposals were not coming from, any of these traditional researchers. They were coming from literally anonymous people in our discord server. But we were all saying like, wow, that's a really compelling study idea. and so I never could have imagined, like, you know, I'm generally not a believer in, like, the experts and all that stuff. And I think that there's a lot more knowledge online than people will give credit for. But I was blown away by like, just the degree to which, we have Ralph on tape, again, the most cited hair loss researcher in the world, saying that the hairdo researchers are better than most of his traditionally trained dermatologist friends. And and that was three years ago at this point. So you could only imagine how much better they've gotten since.

Karl that's amazing. It just shows that there's like so much untapped creativity and knowledge out there that we don't [00:32:00] realize. I mean, you can kind of see it and you feel it, but until you do something like what you guys are doing, you kind of miss out on it.

Erum patient empowerment, right?

Karl Yeah.

Erum They have spent all this time learning about what's affecting them. Some of them are, you know, researchers in their own right. But then there's others that they go online. they're not just googling, they're reading papers. They're trying to figure out how to help themselves,

Andrew The.

Andrew And so they were doing that before hairdo with just sort of publicly available data and papers. And now with hairdo they're doing it with actually their own proprietary data. Because as we generate this data, we token gate it to shareholders of, of certain levels. And so now they're actually sort of armed with the same tools that a researcher at any prestigious university. They're armed with their own proprietary data to then go out and make assumptions about what could be a potential cure for hair loss.

Erum And I bet those shareholders are listening to this episode because they're so jazzed about hairdo and want to hear the latest and greatest. So hello to them. But it's really interesting [00:33:00] because, you know, you're catering directly to the consumer, the patient. There's this kind of line blurring because even you said that, you know, hair loss cosmetic, it's, you know, not a pharma play, but it is pharma to some regard and you're positioning it that way. And some have worked it that way. And it reminds me of the world of biohacking, like longevity, performance medicine. And that's been very capital intensive. that you're bringing the cost down with your research. But how do you ensure that hairdo doesn't just chase short term treatment or token gains, but remains anchored in long term efficacy and patient outcomes? Because it's all about longevity? And how do you approach that?

Andrew I think that comes down to having patients be the token holders themselves. I mean, I think there's a lot more alignment that comes in when, you know, a lot of people that are working with us. main motivation is not financial. And so if we ever are taking sort of more short term monetization routes, we're very quick to get called out and sort [00:34:00] of, this isn't actually innovative. This isn't really going to get us closer to solving hair loss. and there is obviously, you know, there's always a balance to be struck, where it's like, you know, there are steps to getting to being able to turn a slick bald scalp fully hairy. and the first step was, for example, putting out a product that really does work to slow hair loss down or reverse the miniaturization so that we can do the whole process end to end. You know, there are steps along the way. So there is a tension there, but ultimately, myself included, you know, I'm not going to just be happy if the hair token goes up and, and we haven't actually developed the drug that I can say, like will reverse hair loss in a meaningful way. so it comes with being a Patient owner?

Erum Yeah. Not yet.

Andrew Andrew: Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Karl you know, you talked about DAOs at the beginning. You talked about putting everything on chain. but, you know, blockchain tokens, DAOs, these are still very new. You know, having people on a research on a discord server, these things are still very new to researchers and [00:35:00] clinicians, you know, writ large. But how do you find the most powerful bridge language or metaphor that you can use when speaking to that audience about tokens and your approach, you know, from a governance point of view?

Andrew in the beginning, you know, we tried to talk a ton about the token. and I think the realization that we came to was that the token is a tool. It's not the product. and so in the same way that, Uber would never brag about, isn't it so great we give you a ride using the internet and yada yada yada. This is how it works with the internet. It just say, isn't it great that you can get a ride, And so our way of pivoting has sort of been, yes, the token exists, but isn't it great that we can run a study forty x more cheaply than the legacy system? Isn't it great that we filed seven patents in the last year for potentially new drugs. Isn't it great that we have a, you know, a gene map of over fifty targets that we've sort of implicated in alopecia. And so just to focus on the problem versus the [00:36:00] tool that you're using to solve the problem has been our approach.

Erum I love that that's something that we say here at Messaging Lab too. the biggest thing too is isn't it great that you can receive value and money if we sell this IP NFT?

Andrew Yeah.

Erum As a hair holder, is that. Yeah.

Erum Yeah.

Erum I want to be a hair hodler. Yeah,

Andrew yeah.

Andrew Hair holder.

Erum This is so amazing. That's, I think one of the biggest things, because that is aligning all the incentives. And, you know, there's people that put money into meme coins and nothing's going on. Right. It's just excitement and thrills, cheap thrills.

Erum Gambling.

Erum Gambling. Yeah.

Andrew Yeah.

Erum And so this is so mission driven and I love it. This is why we love DAOs. so let's vision here a little bit, right? if you imagine that hairdo succeeds in its mission, what happens next? Does this model scale to other underfunded conditions? Does the token become commodity? The network becomes template. What's your version of hair? Dao two point zero two point

Andrew oh.

Andrew okay, so hair Dao succeeds. And we've developed a drug that, you rub it on your head or you take the pill and it can turn a guy with a slick bald scalp and give [00:37:00] him a full head of hair, like when he was eighteen. so then what's the next step? I thinkif we've gotten to that point, we probably have one of the largest and most unique data sets out there. As I said earlier, for, sort of this unique, very scalable mini organ. Again, I don't know, like, I'll give you twenty hair follicles. I'm not giving you twenty pieces of my liver, twenty chunks of skin. So this is going to be the most scalable data set with a fully intact human mini organ.

Karl we're running a ton of RNA sequencing, a bunch of immunofluorescence, a bunch of different targets. So we're going to have all this RNA sequencing data, all this immunofluorescence data on this intact human organ. And I think from that point on it's you sort of look at the data and let it guide you, to the next indication that's most solvable. And I think we already have a very large, talented, community of researchers. And so there'll be probably a balance between what the community is most interested in solving. I know, for example, a lot of our group is very interested in [00:38:00] like skin aging,there's a lot of people who are interested in fertility, things. and so I think we'll look at the data that we have, probably cross-reference it with a lot of the other indications out there and then, probably have a token vote to let the community decide what makes the most sense, in terms of where we go.

Karl Yeah. And I think along those same lines, let's just look, ten years, you know, in the future, what do you think will have changed, you know, in terms of how we fund, conduct and deploy biomedical innovation? And what role does a project like yours look hairdo play in that shift?

Andrew I think just based on what we've seen, first off, I think we've got to move a lot of the early stage research funding outside of the universities. I think it should be a way more competitive and dynamic environment, and I think people should obviously be able to put forward like competing bids for, it's like, hey, they say they can do it for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Well, we're saying we can do it for six thousand. I think we should introduce a little bit more competition in terms of how funds are allocated, because I think in the traditional university [00:39:00] system, it's just gotten super, super bloated. the idea of like a lot of top universities will charge overhead on a study, which is essentially, you know, they say the study costs one hundred thousand dollars, they charge one hundred percent overhead. So the final price is two hundred thousand. What's that extra one hundred thousand doing? It's essentially people pushing papers around and, you know, filling out various forms to pay those salaries, not actually do the research. so I think that's a big way in terms of, how research gets funded. And then I also think, too, it's just this incorporation of, patients having some say, obviously there's always going to be this tension between researchers who are pouring their life into this versus like the uninformed masses, if you will. But I think what we've also seen is there's a lot of very intelligent patients because it's typically if something's afflicting somebody, they've taken the time to understand it. and I think it would probably save a lot of resources if patients were to say, like, look, even if you're successful with your goal, I have no intention of [00:40:00] ever wanting to try that treatment or use that treatment or, whatnot. And so we've had a lot of cases where researchers come to us and they say, hey, I have this idea. I really want to pursue it. I really think it's valuable, And then our community says, like, we already have this drug over here, which is going to be better than that one. Even if they're successful, there's no reason to fund that. And so I think those two sort of allowing for broader competition, for getting funds from the NIH and really incentivizing that competition, actually. and then also just incorporating patients to some extent, in terms of what gets funded would be massive.

Erum yeah, that is massive. And I feel like it's needed such an elegant solution to everything, to how science is done and how people get the therapies they need or the cures. Hopefully, you know, when you get there. and especially for hair loss, I mean, it's such it's it's so visible. Right. People, can be eating sugar, you know, get diabetes, have high cholesterol, have all these things, but you can't see it, you can't feel it. And so [00:41:00] it's incredible that, you aligned everything so well. And of course it's personal to you as well. So incredible. Well so that's the question typical interview question part of this show. But next part is going to be our quickfire round. And we're going to have to get one of those sound effects that go boop boop boop boop, you know.

Erum Yeah. Or something. Yeah.

Karl So

Erum that's a placeholder. okay. So, I'll ask the first one, then Carl asks the second. We'll go back and forth. Okay. So when you had to choose finasteride or minoxidil, which side would you pick? Purely for the story.

Andrew 33:25 Andrew: For the story? If I had to choose. if I'm choosing to take myself.

Erum Yeah.

Andrew Or for just finasteride? Definitely. I think there's very there's much higher benefits of taking finasteride, but also much scarier risks. So it's a cooler story.

Andrew more volatility. Yes.

Karl Yeah. And you said minoxidil didn't work for you. I've heard that from a lot of people.

Andrew Yeah. It doesn't doesn't do much. It's a good sort of adjunct.

Karl Yeah. [00:42:00] Okay. Crypto token or clinical trial protocol. What's getting you more excited this year?

Andrew clinical trial protocol, I think, will be in a good chance to actually show people the scientific credibility that we've been developing.

Erum Awesome. All right, one experiment inside of Heyerdahl you wish you could undo or redo immediately.

Andrew The observational study of our first T3, trial. We can't call it a trial. It's an observational study. I just wish we had found a way to get more patients. so the data was just a bit more compelling, and we're doing that now, so we're correcting it in retrospect.

Karl And what's the most surprising thing you've learned about hair biology since you started hairdo? 34:36

Andrew I guess I've learned so many different unique things about hair biology. That's difficult to say. I would say the thing I'm most optimistic about is the fact that the hair follicles stay surviving beneath the scalp.

Karl They just shrink.

Andrew They just miniaturize. Yeah, they just miniaturize to the point where we all forget about them.

Erum Okay. Last one. Bull market or full hairline? Which one would you rather have guaranteed forever?

Andrew Andrew: Well, I'm [00:43:00] torn. I full hairline. And you can figure out how to how to make money.

Karl Yeah.

Erum Awesome. Awesome. 35:07 Karl:

Karl All right, so before before we close this out, you had mentioned that you guys are launching something, mid-November. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Andrew Yeah, definitely. this is something that's. Personally, I've really spent a lot of time personally in terms of getting this across the finish line. it's our new topical dutasteride. So I'd mentioned finasteride. Um,that's a five alpha reductase inhibitor. It only inhibits one enzyme of five alpha reductase. Dutasteride inhibits both. So it's a much stronger it's hair regrowth drug than finasteride. but of course along with that higher efficacy comes a greater risk of side effects. So it's all the same side effects that you would get from finasteride potentially erectile dysfunction, infertility, anxiety, depression. but it regrows a ton of hair. And again, it's a relatively low amount of people. People debate what percentage of people actually get side effects. We've seen interestingly, that the higher your testosterone is, the [00:44:00] less chance you are to get side effects from these drugs. But potentially like the people, have to make this decision. do I want to regrow my hair? And am I willing to risk sort of getting these side effects? So over a two year period with this great theory at the University of Brasilia, we have tested over sixty different delivery vehicles. on her sort of pig ear model, actually, which is an interesting model. It's more representative of human skin outside of the body than human skin itself.

Karl Wow.

Andrew because of skin tension changes. But we tested over sixty different vehicles. The first thing we found was how poorly a lot of existing sort of topical dutasteride on the market perform in terms of actually getting the dutasteride to the hair follicle versus just being absorbed systemically. and so we were able to find a delivery vehicle that achieved a targeting factor of three x better than most of the peers, which, just for context, the targeting factor is the amount of dutasteride you get to the hair follicle divided by the total amount of dutasteride. [00:45:00] So a higher targeting factor means you're getting more dutasteride to the hair follicle to stimulate more hair regrowth, but with less dutasteride getting absorbed systemically to cause the nasty side effects I was talking about.

Andrew Wow.

Andrew Andrew: So I am super excited about this one. I think that it probably, I think it would be the most effective hair loss treatment on the market. Like no hands down. and so I'm super excited about it. I'll obviously I've been waiting to try it myself for quite a while now. and I know that our community is is most excited about this one by far also.

Erum : Yeah. And then how can people join the community if they want to try? 37:51 Andrew:

Andrew Yeah. So if you want to try the drug, it's going to be live on anagen.xyz. That is the D to C telehealth brand. I'm super proud of that website as well. it operates similar to a Hims or a Ro, but we're selling proprietary drugs that we've patented and we've developed Those guys, they're real. Innovation has been on sort of the legal aspect of being able to sell drugs online, but they don't actually do research to develop new, better treatments for hair loss patients. So you [00:46:00] can get it online. And then if you want to contribute to the research or just share your experiences on our drugs or anything like that, or commiserate with fellow baldies, uh, our discord server would be the best place to join for the, uh, for the community. 38:35

Erum Erum: Awesome. And we'll link all of that into our show notes. But Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been amazing. There's just so many wins all around, so much innovation put together very elegantly. So we want to thank you for taking the time to share that with us. 38:48 Andrew:

Andrew Thanks so much for having me. It's

Karl Thanks for coming on. Grow everything.

Erum So, Carl, what did you think of the episode?

Karl This was an incredible interview. we had met Andrew at Compounds biohacking event a couple of years ago. I was super impressed by what they had done, particularly the fact that they have this entire community of people who are voting on research, and then that they've built this business around that. And then to top it off, Andrew described this research model that they've developed this proprietary research model, which I am just so impressed by. Aaron, what did you think?

Erum Yeah, love it, the proprietary research model that decreases the cost of in-house research. By so much, I mean, he gave us his numbers. And I mean, I love the fact that he said multiple times turning a slick bald scalp hairy.

Karl he does have a beautiful head of hair,

Erum by.

Erum The way. Does have a beautiful head of hair. but I feel like that could be his. The Heardle. Maybe they should consider it turning a slick bald scalp. Hairy. So that one's for free hair now. but yeah, it's [00:48:00] incredible that they have a variety of products. And what I really find interesting is that they kind of have all the makings of a direct to consumer brand, but they are a pharmaceutical grade treatment, like they offer pharmaceutical grade treatments. And if you guys engage with Heardle, you will see that when you purchase, a treatment, you know, you have to go through an assessment. I haven't gone through the whole assessment or go through the whole ordering process, but you still have to get a prescription to have some of these treatments. I do believe that there is a shampoo, but I don't know if that's prescription based. I'll have to look. And my bad for not knowing that. but they are launching a topical treatment that Andrew mentioned. So, stay tuned for that. that sounds like a very exciting product for people that have concerns about hair loss. I mean, I'll say, when I was pregnant, I lost a lot of hair. Luckily, it came back. I think that's just a byproduct of being pregnant. But,it's a big concern. You know, people can see that, like you mentioned. We talked about that a lot. It's a there's a lot of money that goes into [00:49:00] hair loss because it's so visible, So for those that can empathize with this and need solutions for hair loss, this is the company for you. Engage in the community, be a part of it. Get some hair tokens. I think I'm gonna get hair tokens because it just sounds like this is going to be so successful. So I know they have like one point five million tokens like still available. as of this recording. But you can participate any way you want.

Karl Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned at the top of the hour, investors are clearly interested in this space. you know, two hundred and seventy million dollars is a good amount of money specifically around, Androgenic alopecia, and we had worked with a company that was in that space many years ago. And so we know how important and how big this market is. And I just think that the way that hairdo Andrew and his team have approached this is very unique in the fact that they've got this community. The community is helping them to decide what experiments to do. They're [00:50:00] choosing compounds together. There might be prescription compounds that potentially have hair growth as a side effect. And the community knows these things. And the community is bringing a knowledge to the company that you normally wouldn't get if you're developing a pharmaceutical. You know, just as a company. So I think it's a super, super smart model. And, applaud them.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. This goes back to what we talked about at the top of the episode, this blurring between pharmaceuticals and consumer products. and then to be a little bit more clear on how to engage with her, do they have a telehealth platform? He mentioned it's called anagen.xyz. So that's on the show notes. And you could talk to somebody, talk to a doctor and, get access to their proprietary drugs. But again, the makings of a direct to consumer experience. And I think that's one of the beautiful things here to be able to learn. Right. And then there's this again blurring of the off label use of drugs. And so this is the same the story of GLP one, the off label use of GLP one was weight loss. [00:51:00] people were just using it all. All these people were using it not for diabetes or weight loss. And then they just created a whole product around it. So beautiful, beautiful story. There's a trend here we're seeing, and we'll definitely find other companies and case studies that blur between pharma and consumer.

Erum All right. So as we close out this episode, I know you had an announcement that you wanted to mention. Oh. not an announcement, per se, but, yes, I wanted to mention the future of Fungi awards. So it's a very exciting program because fungi can do so much stuff. If you are creative enough to think of how it could be used. And there are many people out there that are using fungi in different ways. Some we've had on this pod, some we will have on the pod soon. And so the Future Fungi Award is going to announce their winners in a couple of weeks. We will have the founder of Future Fungi Award, Suzanne, on this podcast, as well as the winner and runner up. So stay tuned for that. It's going to get [00:52:00] very interesting when it comes to fungi here on the podcast.

Karl Awesome. Well, thanks for listening. I think that's the episode. please like and subscribe and get on YouTube and like and subscribe us there at a really helps the algorithm.

Erum Yes, yes. Thank you and stay tuned