What source or sources do you consider most objective? Outside of Replicel/Shiseido’s press releases?
I look primarily to the data they
publish (reputable journals are peer reviewed, meaning that experts in the field evaluate your work before allowing it to be posted), data from clinical trials (proper
micrographs, biopsies, and the like from well designed experiments), and to a lesser extent their
patents, and of course the
press releases of the company (they have an obligation to their shareholders to give updates and be transparent about the milestones achieved). Of note is their publication record and the impact factor/number of citations for the papers they publish.
Next, I look at any conference presentations they have given as well; I recommend watching this one:
The man giving the presentation is the coauthor on much of the intellectual property as well as the chief scientific officer the company. And in this particular case, the fact that Aderans and Riken have collected data showing similar approaches with a similar response by the stem cells serves as a great sanity check for the basis of the technology.
Now all that being said, the company can still fail miserably. It could have poor financial backing or financing structure. It could have poor talent, bad execution and leadership, terrible luck, and the list goes on. There is an excellent resource called "The Founder's Dilemma" that goes into detail of many of the failure modes of startups and how to avoid them. On top of that, biotechnology startups have additional difficulties to deal with:
1) Due the product being physical, there is significant overhead for the creation of labs and facilities in order to do the work
2) Cell culturing is time consuming; the amount of time required to run experiments is high so data gathering is slow: consider how there is no way to avoid just waiting 5 years straight, in order to establish safety for at least 5 years (which is a relatively SHORT amount of time for the customer, who is thinking about decades).
3) The final product is administered in humans and the risk of cancer always hangs overhead. Therefore, to avoid a public health crisis, the regulation around product approval is very stringent, as is the case for all medical and pharmaceutical technologies. The trials are expensive and slowed down by bureaucracy. This is exactly why Replicel has turned to Shiseido and YOFOTO - softer regulations overseas and more capital from larger companies.
You can start a billion dollar internet company from your basement with very little overhead other than a few computers and cloud services. It'd be practically impossible for you to start a company that sells drugs or medicines in the same way - this is exactly why the giants in the pharmaceutical industry have exclusive access to pushing the frontier of medicine; they have the ridiculous capital required to make an attempt and still survive if the product fails.
On a personal note, one of my colleagues worked at Merck during a time that they successfully developed a way to vaccinate mice against HIV. But much to their dismay, after significant work on humans, it was found that the treatment was ineffective on people due to differences in the nature of the immune response between the two species. No cigar, mice win again :\. But such is life.
Entrepreneurship is a kind of chicken and egg problem. If you had a product, you could sell it and make money. But to have a product ready, you need a developed technology. To develop the technology, you need money. To get money from people....well, having a product on hand would be helpful.
What really happens is that there is a bit of a leap of faith - the investors are called as such because they take on the risk of failure in exchange for promise of future success. So what happens is that an idea with scraps of data and intellectual property protection - research publications and a patent - is used to convince people to "seed" the company with funding to get started. This money is then used to DEVELOP the product, which does not yet exist. So to your point of "either they have the technology and it works or they don't," this is not how it works. The data so far implies that this approach has a high likelihood of working. But the development of the product and completion of the studies is far from done. As we know, proving that the product works in mice is insufficient to imply success in humans. So there is no way around running experiments on human beings. This introduces another problem of public safety. So instead of getting to run optimization studies to explore the technology, one has to start off on the other end of the spectrum, worrying about safety and only safety at first. That was phase 1. After that, one may slowly approach actually running experiments to figure the technology out, still keeping safety as top priority. The only way to really know if the medicine is safe for 5 years is to run a 5 year experiment, as I mentioned. Clinical trials are grueling and inescapable. The development of the technology is concurrent with the growth of the company due to the heavy financial requirement of developing the technology.