Human lung created in the lab

[baldozer]

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/14/health/texas-lungs-grown/

Seems like there is also soon going to be a cure for baldness.

[PaddyBateman]

What would you categorise as "soon" ?

[ytterligare]

basically one's sick of saying "in 2-5 years", but considering the progress in stem cell and cloning technology, there is a chance that this gets more and more realistic. Perhaps there are only a few times left to say "in 2-5 years"

[locke999]

Before anyone complains "oh, so they can grow lungs now and the hair loss industry can't grow a single follicle."

Read:
Nichols said she thinks it will be another 12 years or so until they'll be ready to try using these lungs for transplants.

And it took 2 damaged lungs from recently dead kids in order to produce 1 that MIGHT be able to be transplanted.

Regenerative medicine still has ways to go. At this point, everyone is still trying to work out the little kinks that comes with growing the organs they want to grow.

[burtandernie]

They say in that article its at least 12 years before they try this in people as a time frame for how long this kind of stuff really is. So yeah in 20 years there is a chance for hair, but you have to keep a realistic view on how slow this stuff moves. People constantly babble on about how amazingly fast it all moves and it really doesnt.

[rhysmorgan]

They say in that article its at least 12 years before they try this in people as a time frame for how long this kind of stuff really is. So yeah in 20 years there is a chance for hair, but you have to keep a realistic view on how slow this stuff moves. People constantly babble on about how amazingly fast it all moves and it really doesnt.

Actually there's an argument about that says technological advancement in general is exponential rather than gradual or stagnant.

[Thinning@30]

Actually there's an argument about that says technological advancement in general is exponential rather than gradual or stagnant.

I've heard this too, but I think things are different when we're talking about advances in medicine. New treatments generally have to go through clinical trials, and the path from proof of concept through each phase of testing to commercial release takes years.

The news about the regenerated lung is especially bittersweet for me. A friend is dying from lung cancer, and no, he was never a smoker. Very sad to think that something that could help is out there, but that it won't be commercialized in time.

[Molten]

This is really promising research in terms of organ regeneration, but don't get your hopes up and thinking these same cell-generation/tissue-engineering techniques translate just as nicely to hair-follicle stimulation.

As seen in all the other threads, histogen, replicel, aderans, and all these other projects are failing to produce anything really tangible. There are solid scientific reasons why they are failing and why cell regeneration as a balding cure is totally impractical.

Baldness will only truly be cured when we have reliable gene therapy, and that type of technology is at least 200-300 years i.e not in your great grandson's lifetime.

[burtandernie]

Well I think growing hair or multiplying hair will be the cure for MPB sooner or later. Companies failing to get results does not mean it cant be done. Failures are a prerequisite for later successes that is how you learn. Could come from gene therapy, but I think figuring out the combinations of genes would take more time then growing new hair or multiplying hair. We already have grown hair in a lab recently some refinements to that to more closely resemble real hair genetically, and MPB is cured.
This is good news though for problems other then hair which are more important in the long run since they are critical health problems. Its just going to be decades away and its possible in a decade its still decades away.

[huawei]

Actually there's an argument about that says technological advancement in general is exponential rather than gradual or stagnant.

Yup, as time goes on the half life of knowledge becomes smaller and smaller. The things we learn today become outdated at a continually quicker pace as discovery continually increases.

[Molten]

Well I think growing hair or multiplying hair will be the cure for MPB sooner or later. Companies failing to get results does not mean it cant be done. Failures are a prerequisite for later successes that is how you learn. Could come from gene therapy, but I think figuring out the combinations of genes would take more time then growing new hair or multiplying hair. We already have grown hair in a lab recently some refinements to that to more closely resemble real hair genetically, and MPB is cured.
This is good news though for problems other then hair which are more important in the long run since they are critical health problems. Its just going to be decades away and its possible in a decade its still decades away.

You're entitled to your opinion, but the problem is, there are good scientific reasons for why it is incorrect. For starters, simply injecting cells into someone severely compromises the cell structure and integrity from the beginning, already rendering them little more than useless. There are some tissue engineering techniques around this, but it presents even more added problems than it solves.

The harsh reality is, other than donor regeneration techniques, there won't be any new treatments than what we currently have in our lifetime. Histogen and Replicel are on the verge of completely calling it quits, and I hope you're not still expecting anything from Aderans. It was an honest research effort, they tried their best at attacking this problem but showed it simply cannot be done by cutting-edge medical techniques.

[Notcoolanymore]

The harsh reality is, other than donor regeneration techniques, there won't be any new treatments than what we currently have in our lifetime. Histogen and Replicel are on the verge of completely calling it quits, and I hope you're not still expecting anything from Aderans. It was an honest research effort, they tried their best at attacking this problem but showed it simply cannot be done by cutting-edge medical techniques.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Please no!

[Molten]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Please no!

I know, it's truly depressing. But hopefully this will save those who think a cure is right around the corner and are thus avoiding current treatments because of the potential side-effects.

[Notcoolanymore]

I know, it's truly depressing. But hopefully this will save those who think a cure is right around the corner and are thus avoiding current treatments because of the potential side-effects.

This is why I push what is currently available. Many guys around here hang their hats on hope that something better will come along. All they are doing is wasting precious time. This is coming from someone that made that same mistake.

[Desmond84]

The harsh reality is, other than donor regeneration techniques, there won't be any new treatments than what we currently have in our lifetime. Histogen and Replicel are on the verge of completely calling it quits, and I hope you're not still expecting anything from Aderans. It was an honest research effort, they tried their best at attacking this problem but showed it simply cannot be done by cutting-edge medical techniques.

Firstly, I wish Aderans started their clinical research now rather than in 2001. The science of stem cells and tissue regeneration was simply NOT there 13 years ago. As a result, in 2007, after a considerable amount of research in scaffolding technology, they gave up on the idea of culturing DP and Keratinocytes on an actual scaffold. The reason being a suitable biomaterial did not exist at the time. Instead, they used an outdated 2D culturing technique to expand DP cells that yielded cells with questionable trichogenic potential and simply injected them blindly into the dermal layer hoping for the best! Not surprisingly, the results were quite poor and 50% of patients could have achieved better results with Propecia alone!

But, we no longer live in 2001...there are several 3D scaffolding techniques at our disposal, 2 of which have proven effective in growing human DP cells in culture. EVAL & Hanging drop method were BOTH tested in the last 2 years using human cells with promising results and more tests are being conducted as we speak.

Secondly, engineering a human hair follicle is astronomically easier than engineering a lung. This is not an exaggeration but a mere fact as is evident with the regenerative potentials of a hair follicle which doesn't exist in lung tissue. Plucking a hair out of its root would simply yield another hair follicle within a given time period depending on its site of origin. Taking out your lung does NOT promote regeneration of a new lung! Hair follicles are grown from a seed. That seed is called a Dermal Papillae and as long as they are still alive and intact, you will have hair growing in that spot on your body for the majority of your life. We are mastering the art of DP culturing and in the next 2 years, we should know how to produce millions of fully functional DP cells within 4-6 weeks! Once this technology is here then we have to simply figure out the right implantation technique to ensure correct angle of growth and MPB is cured.

I can promise you an engineered human hair follicle will definitely be tranplanted into a human subject long before a heart, lung, kidney or pancreas will. One thing Tsuji lab showed us was how simple it is to engineer a fully functional hair follicle! All you need are 2 types of cells: DP & Epithelial stem cells. You simply lay them on top of each other and implant them and you have a hair follicle with all the right characteristics, which connects to all the surrounding muscles and nerve fibers. A lung tissue on the other hand is made of over 30 types of cells, is innervated, highly vascularised, has its own pace-maker like nerve cells and has a very unique branch like structure that is very hard to replicate in a laboratory setting.

I'm more than certain we will have a very real solution to MPB entering the pipeline very soon and maybe it already has since we still don't know enough about how far the Taiwanese have gotten with their research. To say no new treatments will be entering the pipeline in our lifetime apart from better HT techniques is a very BOLD statement and unless there is enough evidence backing it, should be dismissed on the spot.