Human lung created in the lab

[simba]

Desmond84 demonstrates yet again that hes the GOAT poster on this board.

[35YrsAfter]

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.

Great post.

My gut tells me that it won't be that difficult. Internal organs don't suddenly sprout in random places as hair commonly does. As men get older you typically see hair begin to grow on ears, even on the end of the nose. I personally believe that when it's finally figured out, it will seem simple and all interested parties will wonder why it took so long.

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[CAlex]

I have to agree with Molten on this one guys. NONE OF US will see a cure/treatment in our lifetime! case closed.

I didnt know this forum was full of 95 year old mean who have inoperable cancer, standing on train tracks.

Molten is beyond sounding foolish. apparently he can see 2-300 years into the future. I agree with Desmond that we are a lot closer and making huge steps even within the last 5-10 years. Due to all the failures ive seen since beginning my "research" into HL im more cautiously optimistic.

I dont think we will have anything (unless histogen/replicel) announce some new reults or secret trials they've been doing very soon) within 5 years. I CANT see a real game changing treatment taking more than 40 years from today.

thats 35 years of research on top of what we already know and then 5 years for trials. Trials will be shorter in the future. Plus in 40 years looking back at curing HL might be a joke in terms of difficulty. You might just walk into a mall in 40 years and sit under a machine for 5 minutes and it restarts all your hairs. 1974-2014 advances 2014-2054 advances

My guess is between 4-40 years. there could be a few better treatments in between here and 40 years but 40 years will yield a cure/treatment capable of reproducing proper angle/color/textured hair in high density.

[Molten]

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!

This is a good point and I don't disagree.

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.

Just because it is much easier to engineer a hair follicle than a lung does not mean the former will work as well as does the latter. The main problems I initially brought up that these methods essentially compromises the spatial regulation of the hair follicles and are vastly inferior to the natural ones. With transplanted organs, none of these problems occur at all and there is no good reason to think it wouldn't work as well as real organs. With hair follicles, this is obviously not the case.

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.

You're not exactly wrong here. It's highly likely that a hair follicle will be transplanted in humans before internal organs. However, the real question we should be asking is, will it really at all be a success? We know thus far that it is vastly easier to produce hair follicles in the laboratory than internal organs, but to go from engineering to implementation is the big step that separates the two. Implementation of internal organs is actually relatively simple and there are no scientific/engineering problems that need to be solved to do it now. "Transplanting" hair follicles presents an enormous set of hurdles and problems, and it seems researchers would rather take a trial-and-error approach rather than meticulously attack each of these problems before making such wild proclamations that they are on the verge of a cure and it's only 5 years away.

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.

I'm not trying to dismiss their results or breakthroughs, the discoveries over the past few years have been tremendous, but not anything close to an actual cure in my opinion. They might continue to vastly improve the methods to generate hair follicles in the laboratory, but until they can actually implement those hair follicles and show at least 100% hair regrowth in all subjects with no more than a 5% variance, the medical and scientific community will continue to remain unconvinced and skeptical for the most part. In fact, many already in the scientific and medical communities see these methods as extremely barbaric and arcane. That's the reason many of us are skeptical it will ever work. Hopefully, that motivates the ones doing this research even more to prove us wrong.

[Arashi]

, the discoveries over the past few years have been tremendous, but not anything close to an actual cure in my opinion.

Did you read my post on the last page of this thread ? I'm not sure how you could call all recent progress 'not anything close to an actual cure'. They already CAN biogenerate hair follicles with perfect cosmetic features, they only need to get enough DP cells to do it. Jahoda managed to culture DP cells but his method isnt good enough to retain all gene expression, it needs improvement. In Taiwan they found another way to culture DP cells, they're going to start a 400 person trial soon. Cods managed to induce IPS cells to become epethelial cells. If THAT works for DP cells, then that's also a solution. I really can't understand how you call all this 'not anything close to an actual cure' ?

[hellouser]

I'm still wondering what we can do as a community of hair loss sufferers to expedite the damn process. I know everyone always thinks about throwing money at a cause, but money doesnt magically solve a problem, its man hours and competent people that do. But how do we get there?

Desmond, can you shed some light on what needs to be done? None of us wants to wait 10+ years for a cure, or even be told '3-5' years. It's high time for a cure RIGHT NOW.

[HairBane]

I'm still wondering what we can do as a community of hair loss sufferers to expedite the damn process. I know everyone always thinks about throwing money at a cause, but money doesnt magically solve a problem, its man hours and competent people that do. But how do we get there?

Desmond, can you shed some light on what needs to be done? None of us wants to wait 10+ years for a cure, or even be told '3-5' years. It's high time for a cure RIGHT NOW.

Well, something like

1. Put together a team of interested individuals with technical/engineering/design/managerial expertise, etc. with Desmond as the overseer.
2. Start a company or non-profit, with the intention of employing those people.
3. Set out a roadmap or goal. Are you aiming to spend several years developing a complete cure, or do you just want the best tech available right now and put it through clinical trials?
4. Together, build a moon-shot multi-million dollar 'cure/best-ever-treatment for baldness' crowdfunding campaign.
5. Use the money from crowdfunding to license technology from a university, pay a lab to research for you, or somehow hire your dream-team and put them in a lab together.
6. Get in touch with these guys http://transparencyls.com/about-us regarding halving clinical trial cost and cutting the time dramatically.
7. ???
9. Follicles.

[Molten]

Molten is beyond sounding foolish. apparently he can see 2-300 years into the future. I agree with Desmond that we are a lot closer and making huge steps even within the last 5-10 years. Due to all the failures ive seen since beginning my "research" into HL im more cautiously optimistic.

Unless there is a big scientific breakthrough that completely revolutionizes our understanding of molecular genetics in a way that completely overshadows the past 100 years of progress, then I simply don't see how it can be done. I was always extremely skeptical of these cell-regeneration techniques, even though I readily acknowledge the breakthroughs they have made. They can improve these techniques of growing hair follicles in the lab as much as they want, but until they can fully restore the hairlines of an NW6, the general scientific and medical community will continue to remain extremely skeptical of these methods.

I'm not saying it is impossible, no real scientist thinks there will never be a baldness cure. We know how it can be done in principle (gene therapy), but the underlying science is no where near being understood and like I said before, unless there is a complete revolution in our understanding and not these small incremental steps, then it will be at least a couple of centuries before gene therapy is offered by physicians as a valid treatment option.

[Molten]

Did you read my post on the last page of this thread ? I'm not sure how you could call all recent progress 'not anything close to an actual cure'. They already CAN biogenerate hair follicles with perfect cosmetic features, they only need to get enough DP cells to do it. Jahoda managed to culture DP cells but his method isnt good enough to retain all gene expression, it needs improvement. In Taiwan they found another way to culture DP cells, they're going to start a 400 person trial soon. Cods managed to induce IPS cells to become epethelial cells. If THAT works for DP cells, then that's also a solution. I really can't understand how you call all this 'not anything close to an actual cure' ?

Again, I'm not trying to be downer on these breakthroughs, as they are great breakthroughs no doubt. But what I've been trying to say in the past few posts is that growing hair follicles in the laboratory and out of a human head are two completely different problems. The former, while quite difficult technically, is quite easy to do in principle. As for the latter, many scientists think it can't be done at all in any meaningful way.

[CAlex]

is this guy for real? 300 years until a cure? this guy is Hellrouserx1000 with his negative posts. You cant even say his timelines are anything even remotely realistic.

todays world is nothing like what it was 50 years ago. In 50 years technology will make todays latest tech look like rocks. But you somehow can see 300 years off? Im not even mad because im one of these posters desperately believing a cure is right around the corner. But 300 years. get bent.

if you think its 300 years off what are you even on here for? oh to enlighten the rest of us? its your good deed I guess.

Ill check back in 2314. see you guys in a bit. good thing time travel will be around by the time HL is cured so Ill just have my great great great great grandson jump back and cure me. This guy is nuts.