Oh, so now you’re willing to change your mind about Replicel even though you’ve already made up your mind about Replcel based on the small study that you previously said was too small to base a decision on. It’s very hard to figure out what your position is because of your repeated contradictions.
One thing about Replicel that has bugged me all along is that hair inductivity is lost during culture and that should mean that cell treatments like Replicel, Aderans, and Intercytex can’t work until there’s a solution to the inductivity problem.
But I’m not so sure about that anymore.
The studies I’ve seen that indicate that inductivity must be preserved in order to produce hair are efforts to create new follicles. What if inductivity is necessary to create new follicles but it’s not necessary to make already existing follicles grow hair? Creating new follicles is a different biological task versus making existing follicles grow hair. Creating new follicles might require more intervention than making existing follicles grow hair.
No, that’s not exactly right. For DP cells (and I assume DSC cells), you can think of inductivity as synonymous with “activity” of the cells. They end up being either active (able to influence other cells), or inert. The activity is the result of their specialization. When they go through multiple passes, they lose that specialization.
This activity would normally apply to BOTH inducing rejuvenation of miniaturized follicles and inducing de novo follicles to grow.
But the key difference with that and something like Dr Terskykh’s work is that he would be creating a brand new line of DP cells directly from embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Since these are a NEW LINE of cells, they haven’t gone through the multiple generations of division (passes) which gradually caused them to lose their activity. They will be as inductive as brand new DP cells.
Presumably Dr. Tsuji’s strategy of creating hair follicle germs is similar because he says he’ll also be using iPSCs.
So, that should solve the inductivity problem.
Personally, I believe there is no way to solve the inducitivty problem without doing this. I think the efforts by Drs Christiano and Jahoda a few years ago, where they managed to switch on something like 20% of the genes associated with inductive DP cells, hit a brick wall and there’s no further feasible way of manipulating DP cells to become fully inductive.
I believe the strategy of making brand new lines of DP cells is best.
I agree for the most part and I would love it if Dr Terskykh’s or Dr. Tsuji’s treatment were close to market but they aren’t, so I’m hoping that Replicel might turn out to be useful.
Now I do understand that it’s a bad idea to believe in Replicel just because it’s closer to the marketplace than other treatments but there is the factual evidence that all 3 of the cell-based treatments - Intercytex and Aderans and Replicel - all grew small amounts of hair.
So isn’t it possible that even after mass pass culture there is still enough “activity” left in hair cells to get some already existing follicles to produce better hairs than they were before treatment. And what is the alternative to accepting that? It looks to me like the alternative to accepting that possibility is to instead believe that all 3 of them - Aderans and Intercytex and Replicel - have all given us false information that their technology grew small amounts of hair. Isn’t that doubtful?
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@jarjarbinx And there we get back to those “small amounts” again. Not enough hair to interest investors, and financially unsustainable to bring it to market.
I understand that investors are not going to be interested in these small amounts of hair growth. But there are still some things we should kick back and forth:
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Keep in mind that there were hair counts and these were double-blind studies. Do you think it’s possible that all 3 of those companies (Replicel, Aderans, and Intercytex) lied when they said their treatments produced small amounts of regrowth?
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Again, keeping in mind that there were hair counts and these were double-blind studies. Do you think it’s possible that all 3 of those companies (Replicel, Aderans, and Intercytex) made mistakes with their hair counts that resulted in false positive results of small increases in hairs?
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If you think that those companies probably didn’t lie or make mistakes with their hair counts then doesn’t that mean that even though those cells lost inductivity in culture, those cells likely still had enough “activity” left to give some beneficial hair growth effects?
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If you agree with number 3 above, then perhaps Shiseido’s strategy of doing repeat injections might prove even more beneficial than the single injections that Replicel, Aderans, and Intercytex used.
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If ultimately, even after repeat injections, all Replicel’s treatment does is freeze hair loss and produce small amounts of regrowth, then I agree that US investors will lose interest in Replicel. But Shiseido is a big company and they don’t need to worry about investors. And I’ve been told that the Japanese people hate hair loss even more than the Americans. Might Shiseido bring it to market in Japan even if it only freezes hair loss?
No, I definitely don’t think those three companies were/are guilty of lying. Maybe getting unrealistically over-enthusiastic about the potential of their technologies, and letting business decisions get way ahead of scientific validation.
As to whether we can influence Replicel to put its product on the market if it can only “arrest” hair loss and not grow significant new hair, I don’t think we’ll have any influence over that decision. I suspect it will go on the market in Asia even if it’s found to only stop hair loss or return a minimal amount of hair in some people, but I think it’ll be harder to enter the US market with those results. But I could be wrong.
So far, it looks like IF it does arrest hair loss it MAY do so for everyone. not just “some” people. And there’s still the possibility that the treatment could yield better results with repeat injections at intervals.
And if it gets to market in Asia then it’s just an airplane flight away.
I don’t have any intention of trying to influence any company because they don’t care what I think. Either Shiseido will bring it to market or they won’t.
I think Tsuji will be the first to bring a true complete cure to market.
I think Sushi, sorry Tsuji, will fail as previous did so.
Tsuji and some other treatments are about to bring a revolution in hair loss treatments.
I think you’re right @jarjarbinx. Tsuji is the only researcher who appears to have the knowledge, the ideas, the capacity and the funding to develop a real cure.
Terskykh has the knowledge, but not the financing (I fault Sanford Burnham for this.)
Replicel appears to have a faulty method and poor results… not to mention that, they’re financially failing as well.
Follica basically has nothing but a website and a hollow marketing plan for a device… If they could couple that device with a drug that could safely grow lots of hair, they’d have announced it a long time ago. That is proof - they seem to be nothing but a biotech shell company being used as a sophisticated investment vehicle for Daphne Zohar and her team of MBA’s, using Cotsarelis’ name to attract money and attention to their larger PureTech Ventures portfolio, most of which has nothing to do with hair.
Histogen has something, they’ve proven they can grow hair, but will require many repeated injections over the course of your life for maintenance, and probably more treatments than they’ve determined are safe as a baseline, to get anything approaching good results… and there’s no guarantee that the FDA will deem multiple treatments in a short period are safe. They might be approved much earlier in Asia, but that would mean you’d have to fly to Asia just to get a temporary treatment and keep going back for maintenance.
As for the Germans, Lauster et al., they seem to have stalled in their research to create follicles.
Dr. Kemp and HairClone is a wild card. Dr. Kemp is very smart and has a great overall business plan, but they seem to be self-funding with no major outside investors, and their idea of using cell banking to bootstrap the enterprise financially will probably not yield huge revenues. Except for the wealthy, patients will want to see some promise of results before they make that expenditure.