Tweet
I came across this in a NY times article. Does anybody know anything about this? Google doesn't show anything when searching for it.
"Some treatments in development hold particular promise for women. Angela Christiano, a hair geneticist and Columbia University professor of dermatology, is hoping to begin clinical trials in a year or two on a procedure in which she dissects hair-follicle stem cells, grows them in the lab until she has several million, then injects them into the scalp, where, a very small study done with a human skin model has shown, they induce new hairs.
This stem cell therapy needs only a dime-size donor spot on the scalp: 50 to 100 hairs, as opposed to the bloody, painful four-to-five-inch strip of 1,000 hairs typically required for a hair transplant.
“It’s been, I would say, kind of the holy grail in the field to be able to find something that is less invasive, less surgically intensive and can capitalize on the natural properties of these hair stem cells,” said Professor Christiano, who herself suffers from alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes partial or total hair loss.
Her hope is that the procedure (she has helped start a company named Rapunzel to develop it) will eventually become another lunchtime cosmetic treatment. Once a patient has had her cells harvested and cultured, they could be stored indefinitely; then, after giving her doctor a month’s notice (the time it takes to grow the million needed), she could pop in for injections. Costs would likely be on par with hair transplants, roughly $10,000 and up."
"Some treatments in development hold particular promise for women. Angela Christiano, a hair geneticist and Columbia University professor of dermatology, is hoping to begin clinical trials in a year or two on a procedure in which she dissects hair-follicle stem cells, grows them in the lab until she has several million, then injects them into the scalp, where, a very small study done with a human skin model has shown, they induce new hairs.
This stem cell therapy needs only a dime-size donor spot on the scalp: 50 to 100 hairs, as opposed to the bloody, painful four-to-five-inch strip of 1,000 hairs typically required for a hair transplant.
“It’s been, I would say, kind of the holy grail in the field to be able to find something that is less invasive, less surgically intensive and can capitalize on the natural properties of these hair stem cells,” said Professor Christiano, who herself suffers from alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes partial or total hair loss.
Her hope is that the procedure (she has helped start a company named Rapunzel to develop it) will eventually become another lunchtime cosmetic treatment. Once a patient has had her cells harvested and cultured, they could be stored indefinitely; then, after giving her doctor a month’s notice (the time it takes to grow the million needed), she could pop in for injections. Costs would likely be on par with hair transplants, roughly $10,000 and up."
Comment