Q&A with Dr. Aaron Gardner

[sdsurfin]

Ok great, thank you! I wish you guys luck!

[sdsurfin]

Dr. Gardner:

We've talked extensively about the need for co-current therapies in order for the hypothetical follicles that might be induced by one of the teams to survive.

my question is- Do you believe that therapies will be on the same page as you guys when the inductivity probelm is solved? To my knowledge, there hasn't really been any advance whatsoever in the treatment or knowledge of AGA as a whole over the better part of a half century, except for a few vague hunches/products that have not shown particularly promising results, and are struggling to get funding, and really shabby existing treatments (if side effects and modes of action are considered. blocking one of the body's important systemic enzymes is like using an axe where scissors are required). Are you aware of any teams that could roll out effective therapies along a similar timeline to the studies on follicle inductivity?

My guess (and from the sounds of your answers) is that inductive germs or whole follicles will be produced sometime within the next decade, if not sooner. But what good does it do anybody if there's nothing out there to treat and help reverse the underlying condition? There is a lot of chatter on these forums about things like this chemical CB-03-01 and whatnot, but in my mind they all seem like completely untested and long-shot possible therapies with equally probable side effects. Do you have colleagues that are working to find something better? Or has the whole field of hair science veered towards stem cell research? I looked through the titles of the hair congress presentations and all I could find were transplantation talks, stem cell talks, and the odd talk by someone like cotsarellis rehashing information that hasn't really produced any results.

I guess what I'm asking is- is this going to just become another non-option for those of us who refuse to take finasteride because it is crippling to our minds and bodies? As someone much more entrenched in the study of hair loss, I'm wondering if you have any knowledge that might give us hope that some sort of superior therapy is in the works as well as your incredible work with stem cells.

[artika]

Will one require perfectly healthy follicles for this
method, so will this give a person with Dupa a full head of hair ( i understand that he will most likely need cotherapies to maintain it) but is cloning even possible when one has no follicles intact?

[agardner]

Interesting thoughts Dr. Gardner.

Of course, the approach you and your team are looking at is the holy grail of treatments, where you can culture cells and create practically limitless amounts of hair. But a treatment like that still seems a fair bit away.

In the meantime, you have many people who have decided to undergo hair transplant procedures, which are very time-consuming and labourious. With a follicular unit extraction (FUE) procedure, for example, thousands of follicular units can be extracted and implanted over a couple of days.

So if it really is as simple as splitting the follicle at the right point(s), why wouldn't hair transplant surgeons be able to incorporate it in their work? Instead of simply redistributing your hair with a hair transplant, you could potentially increase the number of hairs on your head and preserve the donor area by incorporating these doubling techniques.

A few surgeons/clinics have advertised this type of procedure but I have yet to see any convincing evidence of any hair multiplication, which leads me to believe that it's much more difficult to implement then it sounds. Overall, I think it has the potential to be a promising treatment to bridge the gap before a full-out cure is offered, so I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more research into it. But if progress with cell multiplication is going as fast as has been hinted, maybe it won't be needed

Because in order to split the follicle correctly it needs to be micro-dissected out of its surrounding tissues which accompany the follicle even during an FUE. This takes time ~3-5 minutes depending on the skill of the person and how "clean" the follicle was when it came out. So if you scale this up by the several thousand follicles required you end up with a very large number of man hours.

Lets take a perfect scenario where every follicle comes out clean and 3,000 follicles are used.

2 x 3,000 = 6,000 minutes or 100 hours. Paying for those 100 hours of labour is where the cost comes in as it's quite a technically demanding job and several people would be required = large wage bill. That's the only issue I can see with it, having enough capable staff and paying them enough throughout the procedure as obviously it's very unlikely that this perfect example would occur in the clinic.

[agardner]

Dr.Gardner,

This is kind of a personal question. Why did you decide to study hair? Did you just happen to fall into this field and went with it? What is your motivation. If you could research anything else, what would it be?

If I didn't have hair loss myself, I would think that hair is the most boring body part to research (no offense).

Actually my main area of interest is wound healing and regeneration, so I just happen to be working on hair at the moment and for the foreseeable future. Previously I worked on epithelial-mesenchymal interactions in lung fibrosis, a lot of the techniques are applicable across the various fields and something described in one organ can often be applied elsewhere. I.e the dermal-epidermal interactions in my 3D models.

Also the hair follicle is actually of great interest for lots of people as it has several features unique in the adult. Constant regeneration, some control of cycling, pattering, population interactions. It is also accessible for tissue biopsies, as opposed to say the lung or liver.

[Thinning87]

De Gardner, thanks again for your participation.

What do you think of Follica and wounding used as a method to create new follicles in conjugation with application of fgf9?

What do you think of replicel?

[TheSwingingGate]

Dr. Gardner,

Many thanks for joining our forum.

1) Has there been any work done with eyebrow follicles similar to what you are doing with hair follicles? Would/could the same factors apply for culturing and eventual transplantation of eyebrow hair? Further, do you think these hairs could be transplanted onto the face of someone who lost their eyebrows due to severe burns, and may have scar tissue?

Previously I worked on epithelial-mesenchymal interactions in lung fibrosis, a lot of the techniques are applicable across the various fields and something described in one organ can often be applied elsewhere.

2) Has any of this research been applied to conditions such as Peyronie's Disease or Dupuytren's Contracture? (I hope there are teams working on these devastating conditions.) Might these fibrotic phenomenons be cousins to what happens in a balding scalp?


Thank you for your time.

[hellouser]

Question:

You mentioned that lab grown follicles from DP cells may not function as desired due to the missing fatty tissue thats connected to follicles with typical hair transplants.

Could performing a fat transfer via fat grafting by implanting it from the abdomen prior to injection or implanting bare follicles be a potential solution to this possible problem? Is this fatty tissue basically the same as it is in scalp or are there differences?

Thank you!

[sdsurfin]

Dr. Gardner:

I just read this article, and would love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/scientists-use-lasers-regrow-teeth-stem-cells

Is it possible that using lasers on your DP cell constructs might help restore inductivity? Either while in vitro or in vivo? after reading that article, (and also considering the evidence that laser therapy does, to some small degree, aid in slowing hairloss), I think it just might be a very interesting thing to try. Maybe you guys can create multi-cell type constructs and then charge them up with lasers before implanting? It seems easy enough to do and might be worth a shot. Maybe what's missing when cells de-differentiate is not just instructions from other cells, but rather some kind of charge or energy that is maintained while inside the body. After trying different spatial, chemical, and polarity combinations, this seems a logical route to examine, no?

[Armandein]

Dr. Gardner:

I just read this article, and would love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/scientists-use-lasers-regrow-teeth-stem-cells

Is it possible that using lasers on your DP cell constructs might help restore inductivity? Either while in vitro or in vivo? after reading that article, (and also considering the evidence that laser therapy does, to some small degree, aid in slowing hairloss), I think it just might be a very interesting thing to try. Maybe you guys can create multi-cell type constructs and then charge them up with lasers before implanting? It seems easy enough to do and might be worth a shot. Maybe what's missing when cells de-differentiate is not just instructions from other cells, but rather some kind of charge or energy that is maintained while inside the body. After trying different spatial, chemical, and polarity combinations, this seems a logical route to examine, no?

then, it is possible thar lasers can be useful with hairloss,..., the study say:
"We show that non-ionizing, low-power laser (LPL) treatment can instead be used as a minimally invasive tool to activate an endogenous latent growth factor complex, transforming growth factor–β1 (TGF-β1), that subsequently differentiates host stem cells to promote tissue regeneration"

[sdsurfin]

interesting

Dr. gardener: what do you think of this? seems very applicable.

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-lab-stem-cells-key.html

[joachim]

dr. Gardner,

a theoretical question (because some questions and discussions about fat tissue and fat grafting came up):

when we extract a follicle from the donor site, there is also some fat tissue on it.
is it also possible to isolate and culture fat cells in dishes the same way you do it with the other cell types or is fatty tissue something special? is it even a tissue made of one cell type only or are there more cells in question?

[micgeed]

Dr. Gardner, I know your time is important. One quick ques: When this hair cloning procedure is finally available to the public. "Once this procedure is done on a patient, the patient will not need anymore treatments?

[agardner]

De Gardner, thanks again for your participation.

What do you think of Follica and wounding used as a method to create new follicles in conjugation with application of fgf9?

What do you think of replicel?

I think the wounding idea is very intersting, as if you think about the normal hair cycle the movement of the follicle through the tissue is reminiscent of a very minor wound. Some factor released during this wounding process may be important in follicle maintenance, such as FGF9. The next question, if this is shown to be key, is why is this signal lost.

For replicel, I really don't know anything more than you guys until some information is released. They face the same hurdles as the other groups if they're expanding cells in the lab, but they may have overcome those.

[agardner]

Dr. Gardner,

Many thanks for joining our forum.

1) Has there been any work done with eyebrow follicles similar to what you are doing with hair follicles? Would/could the same factors apply for culturing and eventual transplantation of eyebrow hair? Further, do you think these hairs could be transplanted onto the face of someone who lost their eyebrows due to severe burns, and may have scar tissue?



2) Has any of this research been applied to conditions such as Peyronie's Disease or Dupuytren's Contracture? (I hope there are teams working on these devastating conditions.) Might these fibrotic phenomenons be cousins to what happens in a balding scalp?


Thank you for your time.

Not specifically, but what we do know is that directly transplanted follicles tend to retain their initial character. Currently this character is lost when we expand them, and as we've not rescued full follicle formation we can't currently type the follicles formed. So it may be possible that follicles from anywhere on the body can be pushed into any hair type after culture, or that we need specific follicles for specific hair types.

Not that I'm aware of, I don't know much about either of those disorders. Some of the symptoms correlate with those of fibrotic balding disorders but the underlying causes could be very different.