WCHR 2014 Presentations (Community-funded)

[Arashi]

Here the video btw where they state that they will start clinical trials regarding artificial skin this year:



This only is the epidermis though, for hair regeneration the dermis itself is most probably more important. Still, 'not going to happen in our lifetimes', seems a bald exaggeration IMHO

[Arashi]

@Sdsurfin: while some of what you said are valid points, I think you're exaggarating. First of all, we only need 1 proliferation passage in theory: if we can double the amount of HF's in the safe zone of the scalp, we have enough hair to give people back their original density. I'm not sure I understand though what XU is saying. He seems to think we can't even double the cells, but that's the very definition of cell proliferation/culture Or does he mean that not all cells are usuable ? Can you maybe find that out ?

Then, you overestimate the process. Tsuji and Jahoda proved the cells do all the work themselves, they self assemble into aggregates when put into the right 3d environment. Yes the HF is a complex organ but so is a trachea and we have people walking around nowadays with lab stem cell generated trachea's !

The point regarding future problems is valid though, we don't know what happens with the hairs after time, they might miniturize. Or cancer might develop. All things that need to be checked out in the future.

Also the point regarding foreskin is valid, BUT that doesn't mean per definition that it won't work on adult skin.

And lastly, you said that skin regenation wont happen in a lifetime. This group of spanish researchers is planning to start CLINICAL TRIALS (!!) to do that this year already http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1122084407.htm

[Haircure]

If Cotsarelis was up to something better than finasteride and minoxidil he wouldn't have for sure a problem finding those money.
Typical Cotsarelis...
As for something better from the existing therapies this is cb if things go as well as i hope and may be bimatoprost.
A promising stuff for me is the Singapore team as Desmond said, if there was a fda substance approved .
I hope we have some further information on this.

I'm not so sure about Bimatoprost, I had spoken to a prominent hair loss expert and from what he told me, the trials that are being done haven't shown much promise. According to him they were using a dosage of 0.3% compared to that of latisse which contains only 0.03% and that the results were not better than minoxidil.

[breakbot]

If Cotsarelis was up to something better than finasteride and minoxidil he wouldn't have for sure a problem finding those money.
Typical Cotsarelis...
As for something better from the existing therapies this is cb if things go as well as i hope and may be bimatoprost.
A promising stuff for me is the Singapore team as Desmond said, if there was a fda substance approved .
I hope we have some further information on this.

[Haircure]

in other words: bald for the rest of our lives. a cure in 10 years or longer is inacceptable. once you go bald and get used to it, i'm not sure you will ever go back, even if there is a cure in 10 to 15 years. thus, there's no reason in discussing treatments which are that far away. if it turns out that it's common opinion of the researchers (also from lauster) that a treatment is definitely 10 years away and nobody is willing to start earlier treatments in unregulated countries, then that's it. shave the head and move on anyhow. this is what i will do.

Basically from what I understand there will be no cures for roughly 10 years and the next upcoming treatments are cb, histogen and possibly replicel that will most likely be released in under 5 years. So get a transplant and have decent coverage until then is what I'm considering

[joachim]

in other words: bald for the rest of our lives. a cure in 10 years or longer is inacceptable. once you go bald and get used to it, i'm not sure you will ever go back, even if there is a cure in 10 to 15 years. thus, there's no reason in discussing treatments which are that far away. if it turns out that it's common opinion of the researchers (also from lauster) that a treatment is definitely 10 years away and nobody is willing to start earlier treatments in unregulated countries, then that's it. shave the head and move on anyhow. this is what i will do.

[sdsurfin]

Investing in Cotsarelis is the worst thing you can do. I guess Desmond did not have the time to talk more in depth about this with him. But i would have surely have asked critical questions about that quote. He has no investors or fundings, he lost the faith of potential ones. That is really no wonder obviously. Never did we have ANY proof of de-novo morphogenesis in human beings induced by wounding. And i'm 100% he has not achieved that no way.

It was known by paper "Controllable production of transplantable adult human high-passage dermal papilla spheroids using 3D Matrigel culture". That they solved the DP gene expression problem. But creating a whole hair follicle is on a totally other level. Till now they only managed to induce a tiny brittle hair fiber like substance. Are they advancing? YES. But are they close to the "cure"? Nope that is still a pretty long while away if you ask me. Even if they had the cure now there are several factors which may hold us back of getting it in the coming years.

Good job for reporting in Desmond .

exactly. the hair follicle is a complex organ, and does not grow itself. there is a whole chain(s) of chemicals and interactions between all of the types of cells that go towards making one follicle. even when we have enough of each type of cell, it's like saying, ok here are some nuts and bolts, now make a ferrari without much experience or machinery. you have to figure out exactly how to piece it all together. the fact that they are doing this with hearts and livers etc should provide some hope of possibility, but this is really only the beginning. the mere fact that it's even a possibility is really quite amazing, we can discuss all we want on here, but really the processes involved in crafting a whole organ are so incredibly complicated. I have more hope that in ten years they will have isolated more specific growth factors proteins etc that signal your existing follicles, and come up with a better drug than propecia. the androgen receptors are only the broadest signal, but they are starting to understand more specifically how the cells tell each other what to do. i think the most hopeful and applicable thing that desmond reported on was that team from singapore and their isolation of signaling proteins in the DP cells.

[Swooping]

Investing in Cotsarelis is the worst thing you can do. I guess Desmond did not have the time to talk more in depth about this with him. But i would have surely have asked critical questions about that quote. He has no investors or fundings, he lost the faith of potential ones. That is really no wonder obviously. Never did we have ANY proof of de-novo morphogenesis in human beings induced by wounding. And i'm 100% he has not achieved that no way.

It was known by paper "Controllable production of transplantable adult human high-passage dermal papilla spheroids using 3D Matrigel culture". That they solved the DP gene expression problem. But creating a whole hair follicle is on a totally other level. Till now they only managed to induce a tiny brittle hair fiber like substance. Are they advancing? YES. But are they close to the "cure"? Nope that is still a pretty long while away if you ask me. Even if they had the cure now there are several factors which may hold us back of getting it in the coming years.

Good job for reporting in Desmond .

[sdsurfin]

I'm pasting the email replies I got from Dr. Xu at Penn and Aaron Gardener again, so that you guys understand that a preclinical cure is not at hand, despite progress as witnessed by desmond at the congress. These emails are about a month old and from two top researchers in the field.
---------------------------------------

from Xu:


sdsurfin- To make hair follicle, DP cells are required as you know. DP cells can only be isolated from hair follicles. One hair follicle, one DP cell aggregate. To make more hair follicles, you will need more DP cells aggregates. One recent study (Higgins et al., 2013) showed that DP cells can maintain their follicular genetic capacity if they are cultured in 3D. If you read the paper carefully, they used passage 2-3 cells to make a DP cell aggregate in the culture. Since each DP aggregate contains many cells, it means that this procedure can maintain DP cell folliculogenecity, but not necessarily make more DP cell aggregates. Therefore, the auhtors may or may not be able to make more DP cell aggregates (and more hair follicles) than the original hair follicles that they have taken out from the patients.

Foreskin is very different than scalp. Foreskin is usually from infants and we found that there are lots of stem cells in the foreskin, but the number of stem cells are far less in adult scalp. Thus, transplant the DP cell aggregates to scalp will not work in adult.

To make more DP cells and keep these DP cell with folliculogenecity, we need different approaches, other than what has been described. Our goal is to find a way to make DP cells proliferate and maintain their folliculogenecity. We can use growth factors or transcription factors; or alternatively using iPSC approach to make more DP cells which I think is very much possible.

George

----------------
from Garder:

Sorry for the slow reply I’ve been away on holiday.

I’m not up to speed as to why the various other groups are using their techniques, hopefully will be able to get an update on their work at an upcoming conference. As to why they might use single cell populations, I guess just to identify key promoters in each population. Mixing cultured populations in a 3D model is something that I’m currently working on but currently not at the stage where we can assay inductiveness in vivo.


Maintaining the inductivity seems to go hand in hand with reducing the cells proliferation, when in a matrix/3D model the DP slow down their proliferation and this may have something to do with partially restoring their inductivity. Our current thinking is to rapidly expand the DP in culture then revert them to their inductive state. As to what will happen if we do get follicles successfully forming in vivo I’m not sure if they themselves will miniaturise over time, I think that’s a question for a later date.

Not sure on time courses for treatments, I can see things moving onwards but not sure what if any problems will arise over time.

Cheers,

Aaron
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So let me point out the key issue here, as it took me a while to understand:
Basically, as you split cells in the lab (a passage 2 or 3 cell is a cell that is basically 2 or 3rd generation), they change and lose their original genetics. What gardner is saying is that if you slow down the multiplication of the DP cells, they stay "fresher". Now, the problem is that to make many new follicles, you need many many more DP cells! It's a catch 22, because you can multiply the hell out of them, but the more you do that, the more they become crap.

What Dr. Xu is saying is similar. You can take a DP cell aggregate from the back of your head and culture those cells and now maintain some or hopefully in the future all inductivity, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are making more aggregates. I suppose whether you can make more aggregates depends on how many of the individual cells you can get to proliferate while maintaining their gene expression, and that's why he's saying that diferent growth factors etc have to be figured out, or we have to make DP cells from scratch. that way, all the cells you have are "good" ones, and they can all take their time making their own aggregates. Right now the only thing being done is taking out clumps, then taking them apart, and then putting them back together again, with no net gain necessarily.

So you can see that these are hurdles that are being worked on and will eventually be overcome, but we really are talking years from this until a full follicle is made. and then, as gardner says, even if a follicle is formed in vivo, there could be a million other possible problems. If Dr. Xu is right and the scalp of an adult has way less stem cells than that of a foreskin, then imagine the fibrotic and fat-less scalp of a bald man. People assume that because the new follicles that Tsuji implanted into a mouse connected with existing tissues means that the same will happen in humans. I think that by the time you're bald or balding, your scalp is programmed for the sebaceous glands, the fat cells, etc to degrade, and putting a healthy new follicle into shitty balding scalp is not going to result in proper connections. it's like putting a good plant in bad soil. My guess is that a cure for this will only come when an entirely new scalp skin can be bioengineered, which will surely happen some day, just not within our lifetimes.

[nab]

i dont like this guy cots.... plus they have funds i remember they raising as much as over 20million usd couple of years ago... we should get in touch with other teams outside us such as lausters team.. onething is for sure a cure wont come out of usa they are too busy spending on defense lol

forget cots jahoda/chines/japanese and lausters they all are working on a cure not on something that will just give us maybe couple of hundreds of hair one of the above team should be supported we should really pump some money and take whole thing to a cheaper country with the same doctors its possible man.. if we can build a nuclear bomb/ walk on moon why cant we this... its possible thats all i have to say

[joachim]

hello everyone im new here great first of all i would like to thank desmond and others involved in this..this is a great step in the right direction..together nothing is impossible.

i dont think cots and his team need any money i personally think he was just trying to avoid questions and didnt wanna go into details.. i do think they will come up with something..but will take time thats for sure

a cure doesnt have to come in next 10-20 years if we work together and fund a team which really wants to bring something to the market then its not impossible say 4-6 years.. all they need is to avoid usa/fda. money is a very powerful tool when there is enough money and a dedicated team im sure its more than possible after all at the end its all about money. big drug companies will never ever bring us a cure because that way they wont make much money as they are right now by selling propecia and rogaine.

im only a norwood 2 but hey guys if we wotk together im sure we will have something within 6 years remember the ground research and minor problems are already solved

im personally willing to chip in a whole month of salary whenever there is crowdfunding or even more

trust me we can and we should do it lets stop being miserable and stop whining lets take matters in out own hands
with money u can buy happiness let alone tiny hairs lol

and why im being positive is because i know some people in the field of medical the biggest hurdle always is money according to them

i know together we can

sorry for my bad english im an asian from sweden

well said. i'm also thinking that way. money can and will move mountains.
but first we need more details from desmond

[joachim]

if lauster, jahoda and Xu are really at least 5 years away from a working proof of concept, i mean a perfectly cloned hair, then we should really consider investigating what Dr. Cots has, and if he really is able to bring a kind of bridge for 2 million crowdfunded money. like i said, if he is able to create some hairs with wounding and lithium but maybe not that dense as desired than it's still worth a try. i think it can't be worse than histogen if he says it would be better than minox and fin. the big difference here is, creating hair denovo on bald scalp, not only maintain existing hairs.
however, maybe he is talking BS and wants to get some money, but we should try to find it out and not ignore it. we're talking about wounding for years now but we still don't have a clue how it works. is it just firing a laser onto the skin and apply a lotion or what is about?
we need his phase2 trial results to get an idea of what is going on.

and damn, also i would like to hear an official statement from him why they stated they were able to create consinstently new hairs and VERY CLOSE to releasing a product. it's not funny anymore.

we need to bridge the next 10 years somehow, and CB and pilofocus won't do that job.

as soon as we have more details from desmond, we seriously should try to get in touch with him for a little a talk. we will then quickly find out if he is bullshi****** around and making a fool of us or not.

[nab]

new here

hello everyone im new here great first of all i would like to thank desmond and others involved in this..this is a great step in the right direction..together nothing is impossible.

i dont think cots and his team need any money i personally think he was just trying to avoid questions and didnt wanna go into details.. i do think they will come up with something..but will take time thats for sure

a cure doesnt have to come in next 10-20 years if we work together and fund a team which really wants to bring something to the market then its not impossible say 4-6 years.. all they need is to avoid usa/fda. money is a very powerful tool when there is enough money and a dedicated team im sure its more than possible after all at the end its all about money. big drug companies will never ever bring us a cure because that way they wont make much money as they are right now by selling propecia and rogaine.

im only a norwood 2 but hey guys if we wotk together im sure we will have something within 6 years remember the ground research and minor problems are already solved

im personally willing to chip in a whole month of salary whenever there is crowdfunding or even more

trust me we can and we should do it lets stop being miserable and stop whining lets take matters in out own hands
with money u can buy happiness let alone tiny hairs lol

and why im being positive is because i know some people in the field of medical the biggest hurdle always is money according to them

i know together we can

sorry for my bad english im an asian from sweden

[joachim]

Oh and also interesting: Desmond said that he found out why Aderans failed. Most definitely very interesting info !

probably because they concentrated on 2D culturing only. extract cells, multiply them and inject back is not enough. isn't replicel going with the same approach? then they will fail, too =(

[joachim]

"According to Desmond all research groups said that this year they've all overcome that problem and can now culture DP cells while retaining all genes expressed !"

No one ever said this. Not even desmond really. The only thing we know for sure that these teams have achieved is the same as what christiano and jahoda put on the news. A greater expression of genes in DP cells. That's it. No one said anything about maintaining full gene expression. Also, even if you culture a few DP cells with full gene expression, as you keep culturing them, they degrade. Thats why Xu is trying to make DP cells from scratch, something that will take many more years. in order to make tens of thousands of follicles, you need an exponentially greater number of DP cells, and multiplying them in culture is not enough. That's why his creation of epithelial cells from IPS cells was a breakthrough. Unless desmond comes back with the news that someone has made DP cells from scratch, then there's nothing too game changing here.

is this the case, desmond? has sdsurfin a point here?