this post didn't get enough attention, and leads into some other interesting questions about conditions of the monkeys that I'll just dump here
1. It shows there's potentially ~2.5x (or more) available follicles to reawaken in macaques than humans - so a 50-220/cm^2 range of increase in "thick" hairs in monkeys might be naively translated to a range of 20-80/cm^2 in humans
2. The patent also defines "thick" hairs in a way that might not map to human terminal hairs - choosing a smaller cutoff
What width of monkey hair is vellus vs terminal? Is there any reference that shows their chosen thickness actually equivalent to what we consider terminal? If not, this could substantially inflate the "thick" count. A histogram of follicle diameters would have answered these questions
Does their definition of "thick" hairs correspond to other Androgenetic Alopecia studies in macaques? Is this a standard?
3. How were the monkeys selected? Inclusion/exclusion criteria? Any possibility of bias?
What about any pre-existing skin conditions? Infections? Health status (diabetes, hypertension)?
Several references of animal welfare studies in monkeys show that patches of baldness and chronic telogen effluvium are pretty common
Stumptailed macaques *can* have Androgenetic Alopecia - but *did* these particular ones actually get diagnosed as having that?
4. Monkeys have much more pronounced seasonable shedding cycles, outside the duration of the study. What was the documented timing of this in the monkeys, in relation to the study timing?
5. Did their environment change? Was their housing consistent, or did it change upon commencement of study (e.g. single caged or shared cages)? If they were moved, was there a period of acclimatization? Did the food, exposure to sunlight, temperature, or interactions with humans change?
tl;dr -
Only 2-3 monkeys would have been necessary to control for everything I just listed above, given how powerful an effect was expected
The whole point of control groups is that you don't have to care about most of the above details, that's why it's such an important scientific tool and why highly qualified scientists deliberately choosing not to use it makes it hard to have high confidence in the effect until higher quality information is available, given obvious possible biases
But they seem to have done whatever it takes to get Series B funding and a fileable patent...maybe the effect is real but I'll wait for phase II