First Study to Convert Adult Human Cells to Hair-Follicle-Generating Stem Cells

[hellouser]

Also, for the real daredevils who don't want to wait for clinical tests, there surely will be even other options, once research is published on how to do this, that's a sure thing too.

Let's just all pitch in cash, but our own equipment and do it ourselves.

[FearTheLoss]

Follica must be focusing on brining their product to the market still? They have stated they are going to be releasing something soon, I bet they have found wounding can me a major breakthrough, better than anything we have yet...but cloning is still needed for some...and people such as burn victims.


They wouldn't just give up on something that has obviously shown them numerous positive results

[hellouser]

Follica must be focusing on brining their product to the market still? They have stated they are going to be releasing something soon, I bet they have found wounding can me a major breakthrough, better than anything we have yet...but cloning is still needed for some...and people such as burn victims.


They wouldn't just give up on something that has obviously shown them numerous positive results

What I dont understand is peoples passiveness towards Follica based on this:

Wound -> Apply Chemicals -> New Hair Follicles

Essentially, we're creating follicles at will. Why not just repeat the process until we're satisfied with the number of follicles?

[FearTheLoss]

What I dont understand is peoples passiveness towards Follica based on this:

Wound -> Apply Chemicals -> New Hair Follicles

Essentially, we're creating follicles at will. Why not just repeat the process until we're satisfied with the number of follicles?

Good question, I'm guessing some people's bodies don't have the ability to create enough follicles or maybe there is a low responder rate...but it seems almost everyone in the derma rolling trial saw some benefits...and that's just minox and derma..nothing crazy scientific

[rdawg]

More and more progress!

it's slow but it's there, the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.

[hellouser]

Good question, I'm guessing some people's bodies don't have the ability to create enough follicles or maybe there is a low responder rate...

But that's what the chemical agents are supposed to get around, FGF-9 and whatever else we don't know about. If it works once... why not keep doing it?

[Thinning87]

Nowhere did it state that. Why would you assume that?

Well I mean he has a good point, unless I'm missing something, this approach seems to ignore the wounding theory and use a stem cell approach to create follicles (once they figure out the dp cells part as well unfortunately) rather than just wound the skin and apply the right chemical at the right time.

It doesn't seem like this discovery helps Follica, and in fact it comes from the university, not the company. I am sure they fall back on the university to lead additional studies when they can, so I wonder how this plays into the Follica methods. Or hey, maybe they're just studying other things at the same time. I mean after all the same science has other applications, not just hair creation.

As always, no point in overthinking this. They are making progress and there's no point in speculating too much why and how they are doing certain things. Much better improve our lives in other ways and when the cure comes we will be supermen I promise you.

[hellouser]

One day brother. Feeling sad won't get us there faster. The research is coming along at an amazing pace, I have zero doubt it'll be demonstrated soon. If there's an area we should attack to help progress things more quickly, it's the weak link in the chain - the approval process. That, or crowdfunding something.

Btw, Bell Canada (one of our telecommunications companies here) launched a social media campaign to raise awareness and money for mental health initiatives. Their strategy was to use the #BellLetsTalk hashtag, a promoted hashtag actually, and for every tweet that went out with it Bell put in 5 cents for each.

They raised more than 5 million dollars in ONE DAY.

[beetee]

As far as interpreting Follica's intentions in the light of the fact that these findings came out of Perelman, it is true that this approach is different than the wounding approach. However, this is actually an interesting reflection on the difference between academic research and that solely intended for commercial purposes. The folks at Perelman, which is overseen and directed by Cotsarelis, would seem to be interested in pursuing different paths that could eventually lead to treatments. If only one of these paths ends up leading to a truly effective treatment (or if none of them do), they've still discovered lots of valuable things along the way, things that can be applied to lots of medical situations outside of hair loss.

In other words, let's say that Follica was able to use wounding to regenerate full heads of hair. Perelman wouldn't necessarily stop investigating how to use stem cell treatments to get the same results, as their interest is more in seeing if and how they can do this than in just developing a specific treatment and then calling it a day.

[Scientalk56]

George Cotsarelis - should Get a Nobel prize..
Every time I hear about some breakthrough, George Cotsarelis is always involved...

It's great news, but we have to know that it will take a lot of time.. no one can estimate how much..

That's why i am waiting for a better treatment, Because finding a cure will take much longer, but at that pace - Its seems like we're going to have a cure while other companies still trying to make better treatments..

Anyway, This kind of News that we should listen to and trust, anything that is Peer-reviewed article is scientifically proven... not like piloxll and CB 03-01 and bullshit stuff...

[BoSox]

How does this differ from Follica's approach or is it the same thing?

[HairBane]

How does this differ from Follica's approach or is it the same thing?

It's a completely different thing. They don't need to turn iPS cells into epithelial stem cells in order to generate hair using the wounding method. The technique they're developing for commercial applications uses a wounding device, then the application of a topical (which either directly contains the FGF9 protein to induce hair follices, or somehow stimulates the scalp to produce the protein itself in excessive amounts, which is probably what they've got in trials right now).

Remember that this is a university just doing general research into hair regeneration and trying to build an understanding and try different approaches and experiments. They aren't necessarily licensing everything to Follica. Follica is a company built around the wounding procedure discovered at the university, but the university is continuing academic experiments obviously.

[BoSox]

It's a completely different thing. They don't need to turn iPS cells into epithelial stem cells in order to generate hair using the wounding method. The technique they're developing for commercial applications uses a wounding device, then the application of a topical (which either directly contains the FGF9 protein to induce hair follices, or somehow stimulates the scalp to produce the protein itself in excessive amounts, which is probably what they've got in trials right now).

Remember that this is a university just doing general research into hair regeneration and trying to build an understanding and try different approaches and experiments. They aren't necessarily licensing everything to Follica. Follica is a company built around the wounding procedure discovered at the university, but the university is continuing academic experiments obviously.

Thank you for clarifying this for me. So why is everybody freaking out? Follica have consistently grown new hair follicles. Is that not the cure we're all waiting for?

[HairBane]

Thank you for clarifying this for me. So why is everybody freaking out? Follica have consistently grown new hair follicles. Is that not the cure we're all waiting for?

It's a critical step forward for proper hair multiplication, I guess. A few injections in your scalp and you're set for life. We don't know for sure if the Follica regrowth will be DHT resistant, or whether it will be cosmetically ideal, but it's certainly going to feel like a cure for most people, I believe.

Follica said in its statement that it has already done preclinical tests that combine devices it has created to disrupt the skin with several unspecified “known and novel drugs.” It also claims to have run “a series” of human clinical trials, including a mid-stage study that has caused new hair follicles to be produced in humans. Unfortunately for our rabid readers, however, Olle and Follica aren’t offering many details from these studies, other than to indicate that the platform is proving to work so far and that the research has paved the way for the company’s next step: to try a specific device configuration with a specific, well-known and studied drug (meaning it wouldn’t have to be as extensively tested as a new chemical) in a group of human patients.

“We’ve been able to consistently show that we create substantial new hair follicles in humans, and that’s something that no other approach in hair loss as far as I am aware has been able to achieve,” Olle says. “That’s a critical step. The goal of some of those early trials has been to test the hypothesis of the mechanism that we had seen in mice.”

Follica would still have to determine in longer trials and follow-ups with patients, for example, how long the new hair lasts so as to know if patients would have to get another procedure down the road.

[Sogeking]

I'm not sure what you're saying. It has been proven already (by Tsuji for example), that a combination of epethelial cells + DP cells generates hair. Epethelial cells could already be cultured. And now they even have an alternative source for epethelial cells: induction from iPSC cells. That still leaves us with the DP cells problem. They either need to expand DP cells (which Jahoda partly succeeded at last year, unfortunately his method wasnt good enough yet), or they need to generate them from iPS cells. Once they succeed at either of those venues, then we're done (except of course for clinical trials but again, I'm sure there will be alternatives in the non western world by then, for the daredevils).

Let the negative people repeat a thousand times that we're never going to succeed: anyone who is following all the progress knows that we're DAMN close now.

How do you draw '15 years' from fruition? Why is this arbitrary number always thrown at development of something that has no definite end result pathway? There's no way to gauge any of it other than the bullshit required YEARS from the FDA before a commercial product... thats for sure, but nobody should be putting up with the FDA for stem cell treatments, this sort of thing needs to be moved over to a forward thinking nation like Japan where there isn't this much red tape.

Okay, let me clarify what I meant by 15 years, obviously it has stirred some emotions.

Basically the last paragraph in the previously linked:

What's more, the process Xu used to create iPSCs involves genetic modification of human cells with genes encoding oncogenic proteins and so needs more refinement. Still, he notes that stem-cell researchers are developing more workarounds, including strategies using only chemical agents.

They state the process needs more refinement, so they need to refine the process before even starting with the clinical trials. And average length of clinical trials for the new drug is 10-15 years. Hence the aforementioned 15 years.

Now of course if they do the clinical trials in Japan then that is a whole other story, that is why I suggested they could do the clinical trials for epithelial cells and then actually use DP cells the same way Aderans did. No need to wait for someone to create DP cells from iPSCs (currently being experimented upon by Dr. Christiano).

However that said we need something before that something to help us at least stop hair loss or add some density until we wait for this cure.

I mean I still have no idea what clinical trials Follica is performing.