"The Kerastem therapy is a combination of fat based stem and regenerative cells and fat tissue purified with Puregraft, the market leading fat transfer solution…“Successfully completing enrollment of STYLE is a foundational step towards Kerastem’s goal to be the first U.S. FDA approved stem and regenerative cell therapy to treat hair loss.”
wow ! I ve never heard of Kerastem before, they are starting phase II already? 
Here’s their website, they have some before and after pics:
Seems like subtle improvement, nothing really impressive though unfortunately.
It is already commercially available in Japan !
It looks good on paper but it doesn’t sound like this is the kind of hair multiplication we want, this sounds awfully similar to what they do using platelet rich plasma.
Your post is uninformed.
Yes, platelet rich plasma injections and Kerastem injections both involve injections but each treatment injects different substances into the scalp. They are NOTHING alike. If you inject water into skin it’s not the same as injecting ketchup into the skin.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by jarjarbinx[/postedby]
Your post is uninformed.
Yes, platelet rich plasma injections and Kerastem injections both involve injections but each treatment injects different substances into the scalp. They are NOTHING alike. If you inject water into skin it’s not the same as injecting ketchup into the skin.[/quote]
I never said the 2 are the same, I said the 2 protocols are similar in the sense that they just arbitrarily took something out of our body and inject back into our scalp. There is no real effort in isolating the stem cells that are truly responsible for hair growth and multiplying them before injecting into our scalp.
How do we know it’s the injection of plasma or fat cells that cause any regrowth–and not just injury from the needle alone that might be stimulating regrowth?
Has anyone done a controlled experiment to see if injecting saline solution grows hair–or just sticking needles into the scalp without injecting anything, grows hair?
Let me guess: nope.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by Ahab[/postedby]
How do we know it’s the injection of plasma or fat cells that cause any regrowth–and not just injury from the needle alone that might be stimulating regrowth?
Has anyone done a controlled experiment to see if injecting saline solution grows hair–or just sticking needles into the scalp without injecting anything, grows hair?
Let me guess: nope.[/quote]
Exactly. I’ve been saying it for years.
It’s known that needling produces slight hair gains. It’s known that dermbrasion does too. Pretty much any method of wounding the scalp without drawing a bunch of blood will show this effect.
Yet HM researchers never elect to run a control group for the injection process alone. Coincidence?
I understand where you’re coming from jarjar, yes, it’s a pretty big distinction, but Norwood3 has a serious point. There are also big parallels between the two treatments. I think this is a better approach than PRP, but still it’s just taking cells out of one part of your body, and injecting them into the scalp – as Norwood3 mentioned, without selecting for or multiplying stem cells.
I think people get overly excited about treatments like Kerastem. Inevitably, in the British tabloid press and elsewhere, we see these developments hailed as potential “cures” (they always use that word.) But, they are just incremental developments, and rather small ones at that.
I think people are confusing “necessary” with “sufficient”. Kerastem, with its injection of fat tissue, may be providing growth factors necessary for hair growth, but not sufficient to regrow a lot of hair in the vast majority of people with MPB. They’re touting this as a treatment aimed at both women and men, but primarily targeted at women. Hmmm… I wonder why. Probably because women tend to suffer from much milder hair loss than men with MPB. But, even on the women tested as shown in the photographs, improvements are pretty minimal. Hmmmm… I wonder if what they’re selling here isn’t just one more in a long line of marginal treatments.
Just because a Yale study says that “all the growth factors you need for hair growth are in fat tissue” or ADSC’s, doesn’t mean that this can cure you of MPB. All the growth factors needed to grow hair are definitely in there, for sure – but that’s assuming that the subject is genetically healthy and not suffering from MPB. MPB is more than just an incremental removal of growth factors. It’s a pervasive and chronic depletion of activated stem cells (the stem cells remain, but they don’t go into active mode), and a progressive destruction of follicles. You can restore all the necessary growth factors, and maybe grow a bit of hair, but it won’t necessarily cure you, because your HF stem cells and DP cells are still seriously being suppressed by an “outside” force – DHT. Restoring growth factors is necessary for hair growth, but it may not be sufficient to do much in people with advanced MPB.
I think Kerastem will turn out to be a marginal treatment. Bottom line, the things it is providing are “necessary but not sufficient” to fix your hair loss problem. We shouldn’t get “necessary” confused with “sufficient”.
Exactly.
All the nutrients required to grow a child into adult size are present in a normal balanced diet. But it doesn’t mean you can make a short adult any taller just by feeding him that diet.
Yes. It’s like the closure of the epiphiseal plates in the long bones at puberty, at which people reach their permanent adult height, and can’t get any taller (without bone-breaking surgery). With MPB, you have to have something stronger than just incrementally increasing the amount of growth factors present, in order to get over the “hump” of MPB pathology.
Contrary to what some people here have said, I think Kerastem and anything based solely on restoring fat tissue, ADSCs, or growth factors, will not be a really impressive treatment, and will NOT grow enough hair to transform (for example), a Norwood 6 into a Norwood 2. You have to have something much, much more powerful than that, to achieve that magnitude of cosmetic results. And by much, much more powerful, I’m referring to a fully cell-based treatment ONLY.
Yet transplanting a fully-balded follicle onto a mouse makes it regrow to full size. It doesn’t line up with the narrative that “we need cells replaced to regrow anything”, does it?
And then there are the inconvenient observations of everyone from dermatologists to fellow MPB sufferes that superficial skin injuries to the scalp can provoke new follicle formation.
The facts are still stubbornly refusing to cooperate with science’s understanding of MPB. I doubt researchers will make very much practical progress on treating the condition until they get serious about understanding it first. They still aren’t really doing that.
Transplanting a fully balded human follicle into a mouse makes it grow to full size? Really? I hadn’t heard that. Not without doing something else to the follicle, adding some chemical or treatment. Can you cite a reference for this?
It was on an immune-suppressed mouse (to prevent rejection of the foreign tissue). Fully MPB’d human follicle --> full sized regrowth.
I might still have a citation noted down somewhere on my old computer’s hard drive but, yeah, its been done.
It’s tempting to toss this phenomenon into the mental recycle bin because it has no direct usefulness for practical MPB treatments. But the implications of it are big. Even severely suppressing a human’s immune system won’t help reverse the MPB process. Something else is at work in the mouse’s biology that flatly shuts down the MPB problem cold.
It proves even balded human follicles can be revived under the right conditions. The “permanent scarring” in an MPB’d follicle does not pose any real problem at all. It also demonstrates how ridiculous the mouse research model is for studying MPB. You literally cannot give a mouse MPB if you try. It’s sort of like trying to study the later progression & effects of AIDS using test subjects with fully-functioning immune systems.
Here’s a quick & dirty googling job:
The final sentence of the text:
“In summary, this report demonstrates that balding, miniaturized follicles possess the potential to quickly regenerate once removed from the human scalp and that the phenomenon applies equally to follicles from both men and women with AGA. These findings expand the use of this model beyond a tool for screening potential therapies to one that may yield insight into the mechanisms involved in AGA induction in both men and women.”
HM operations habitually go into the job already wedded to a solution while they have an inadequate understanding of what they are trying to solve. It’s just the nature of the beast with commercially-motivated medical research.
MPB needs a lot more pure research to improve the treatments. Absent that, even if we do get a better treatment option it still might turn out to be far more expensive & invasive & PITA than was really necessary. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened. If the next MPB solution is cellular then IMO that is quite likely to be the case.
Nature shows that the MPB’d follicles can be restarted in certain circumstances and that our bodies can even generate all-new follicles with its existing repair hardware. It’s our problem if we elect to ignore these facts and keep working on more complex fixes.
If we do get a better treatment any time soon it will have as much to do with chance as anything else.
We have a car that is stalling and struggling on hills. We have mechanics who are ready to try boosting the horsepower with nitrous oxide to make up for it. Others are going to trade school for years to learn how to build a whole new engine from scratch. But they aren’t very interested in understanding why the intact assembled engine isn’t working quite right. Even if these mechanics do manage to get us back on the road at some future “5-10 years away”, it will probably come after a whole lot more time and money than it should have.
OK, thanks. Good find… But I disagree that there’s no obvious practical application for this. I can think of at least one:
How about removing balding follicles from a human patient’s scalp and then transplanting them into mice to regrow them, then re-implanting them back into the human? Subsequently, their size can be maintained with drugs (minoxidil, etc.) This may sound like a stretch, but if this could be tested, perhaps researchers could eventually isolate exactly what factors in the mouse tissue are causing the follicles to grow larger, and then replicate that step in vitro and eliminate the mouse step.
One other thing – are they sure that the resulting enlarged hair follicles are 100% human? Could they in fact be mouse hairs? Or “hybrid” chimeric follicles with a mixture of human and mouse cells? Remember that when Dr. Jahoda biopsied the follicles he grew on his wife’s arm with his own cells, he found the “new” follicles had a mix of male and female chromosomes (an easy test to do). The follicles were chimeric. Also, one researcher criticized the Sanford-Burnham results and said the hairs they grew on mice using human stem cells were probably really mouse hairs. Don’t know if that was ever confirmed.
The phenomenon was first discovered many years ago. Nothing new.
It’s just a sidebar in MPB research that the HM-Operation-of-the-Week never deals with. It does not point to an obvious commercial solution and studying it would require jumping through some extra hoops.
I don’t know of anyone testing those mouse-regrown follicles for chimaeric issues but I doubt it was a factor. Those were not follicles being grown from cells, they were live intact follicles lifted right from a grown man’s scalp. It was basically putting HT grafts onto a mouse. The grafts don’t need nearly as much “stuff” from the new location as with Jahoda’s cell work.
As for practical application, researchers are probably not very keen on taking grafts from the mouse back onto a human subject again because of safety unknowns.
IMO it might be more useful to do some more experimentation along these lines and look for differences between mice and stumptailed macaques.
But who would fund this kind of work? Not the HM-Operation-of-the-Week. They have cellular & growth factor crap to try! Don’t trouble them with other distracting avenues when they have already decided where they are going to find the solution! And if that doesn’t work then their funding dries up and they get shut down.
Eventually the next HM-Operation-of-the-Week will show up. They will already know what the best treatment plan is before they start, too. Whatever it is, it probably won’t come from the annals of existing inexplicable MPB info. No, it will be another cell replication scheme. Or maybe a new alphabet-soup skin component to mess with. Yeah, maybe they will get lucky. We can hope.
Sometimes the answer is so obvious it may be staring us in the face: could it just be that, once removed from the man’s scalp, the follicles were no longer subject to DHT and its downstream effects?
Have they ever tried to transplant a balding follicle from a man onto a female human’s healthy (hair-bearing) scalp?
I mean, HT docs do the reverse all the time, transplanting healthy follicles to balding areas. Why not try the reverse and see what happens? And use a female human as the recipient so there would be little or no DHT.
I would guess that someone’s already done this, but I’d like to know what happened. The result could tell us whether that mouse experiment showed us something really significant, or just something obvious like what happens when you remove a follicle from exposure to a DHT filled environment.