Shiseido (Replicel technology) baldness cure on the market by 2018?

https://globalcosmeticsnews.com/asia-australasia/1544/shiseido-claims-to-have-found-a-cure-for-baldness-available-from-2018

Sounds like this may be useful to people who have a mild to moderate amount of hair loss. But it is not going to turn a Norwood 5 into a 1, so it’s not a cure.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by Christopher1[/postedby]
Sounds like this may be useful to people who have a mild to moderate amount of hair loss. But it is not going to turn a Norwood 5 into a 1, so it’s not a cure.[/quote]

What are you basing this on?

Balded follicles don’t literally “die” they just wither down until the hair being produced is cosmetically useless.

If Replicel is onto something (I doubt it) then it might very well work on balded skin. It might even help create new follicles for all we know. They don’t even know that yet AFAIK.

Either way I wouldn’t get too excited over this announcement. Replicel likes to make big claims. It has not paid off in the past.

Their near-sounding release date is not because they are farther along than the standard “5-10 years” HM researchers. Replicel can float a sooner possible timeframe because Japan allows them to release things for sale halfway through the trials process compared to the USA. Right now they are no closer to proving it grows hair than anything previously was.

Pretty grandiose rhetoric from a company who, to date, have only managed to regrown terminal hair in the 3-6% range. I’d be impressed if they could match minox/fin. But, they’ve yet to come anywhere near that. Sounds to me like they’re using this for marketing purposes. Show us some photos of what you can do and we’ll be the judge of whether a cure is coming or not.

Looks to me like this is something fundamentally different than what Replicel was doing before. This is cell reprogramming, they’re taking somatic cells and reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells, and probably from there into hair inductive DP like cells. Essentially the same thing as Sanford-Burnham is doing. In SB’s paper they mentioned it could be done with either embryonic stem cells or iPS cells.

I also think that last description (in the second link posted by baldlatino) didn’t get it completely right. They aren’t just enlarging miniaturized follicles, they would also be growing new follicles like SB.

Creating inductive DP cells from iPSCs is a bit harder than SB’s procedure using embryonic stem cells because iPSCs don’t occur naturally in the body. They have to be made first and I can imagine that that process is probably pretty long and expensive.

Are you sure?

Are you sure that they have found a different way to do the same thing that S & B did?

If you’re right then what happens to S & B and their 10-year timeline?

If you’re right I wonder how S & B will react to this.

If they’re making induced pluripotent stem cells, I can’t imagine them using them for any other reason except making hair inductive DP cells. The way I see it, there is no other use for these cells in hair regeneration research apart from doing an SB-like procedure.

That said, I don’t know where the SB “10 year” time frame came from. Is that a definitive statement by the institute itself, or just people on the forums speculating?

Also, I think we’re still missing a lot of facts here. I think Shiseido’s original materials were probably in Japanese and then translated, and the translations were incomplete because as a cosmetics company, they’re mainly interested in PR and marketing, rather than in communicating scientific information.

I also think that they may not have researched this, but rather they jumped on the commercial oppprtunity when Replicel saw what SB had done, and this is how they got the idea.

Once the cat is out of the bag about this stuff, it’s not rocket science to try to replicate it. It may be hard, but it’s not rocket science.

Even if they successfully enlarge existing and grow new follicles, what are the odds this procedure would grow cosmetically acceptable hair on a 20+ year bald scalp?

…how affordable/practical would repeat injections be?

There is some question about the efficacy of a procedure that purports to enlarge miniaturized follicles in long bald scalp. I definitely don’t think it’s out of the question, but there may well be a positive correlation between the duration of baldness and the difficulty in doing this.

With respect to growing new follicles though, I think it’s long been established that there wouldn’t be a correlation. Jahoda proved you can take fully inductive DP cells and inject them into hairless skin, and get new cosmetically visible terminal follicles. So I think if we’re going to try to debate that point all over again, we’re wasting our time because it’s already been proven to be the case.

I’m certain that as long as we still have peach-fuzz those peach-fuzz producing follicles can be enlarged and then they will grow longer thicker strands of hair. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen it happen with “success” patients using minoxidil and/or Propecia. I

With respect to growing new follicles though, I think it’s long been established that there wouldn’t be a correlation. Jahoda proved you can take fully inductive DP cells and inject them into hairless skin, and get new cosmetically visible terminal follicles.

Was it hairless skin, or just skin where hair wasn’t previously growing? More importantly, did Jahoda’s experiment prove he could grow, and sustain vibrant hair–as in hair that regularly cycles and appears healthy with each new cycle–in a 20+ year bald scalp?

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by roger_that[/postedby]
Looks to me like this is something fundamentally different than what Replicel was doing before. This is cell reprogramming, they’re taking somatic cells and reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells, and probably from there into hair inductive DP like cells. Essentially the same thing as Sanford-Burnham is doing. In SB’s paper they mentioned it could be done with either embryonic stem cells or iPS cells.

I also think that last description (in the second link posted by baldlatino) didn’t get it completely right. They aren’t just enlarging miniaturized follicles, they would also be growing new follicles like SB.

Creating inductive DP cells from iPSCs is a bit harder than SB’s procedure using embryonic stem cells because iPSCs don’t occur naturally in the body. They have to be made first and I can imagine that that process is probably pretty long and expensive.[/quote]

Did you see where the poster named “thedayafter” indicated that it could cost a million dollars per patient to create IPS cells? Is it really going to cost a million dollars per patient to do this? If it is then this is not a cure for us.

HTs have no trouble surviving in long-balded skin. The skin regenerates the necessary blood flow with no problem as long as the HT scarring was not excessive and the grafting was not excessively dense-packed for a first session.

As for Jahoda, he conducted his test on the skin of his wife’s foream, in an area where no hair had ever grown before.

Yes, I saw that, and he was basing that on a comment by Dr. Yamanaka, who is a pioneer in the field of iPSCs (side note: maybe Shiseido/Replicel will be employing him?)

I think Dr. Yamanaka, if he actually said this, was referring to growing iPSCs in general, the comment was not necessarily specific for hair. Also, he was talking about making custom lines of iPSCs for individual patients. But, he may not too far off the mark if that’s what he’s talking about. I can’t see it costing $1 million per patient, but I can see it costing quite a lot, maybe well into 6 figures. This is a complex, multi-step, state-of-the-art laboratory procedure. It’s about as advanced as cell biology gets right now.

It may be possible however to grow generic iPSCs from one donor and then create inductive DP cells from this for many patients. We know that DP cells alone when allografted from one person to another do not seem to precipitate an immune response (look at Jahoda’s classic experiment with his wife. Also, what SB is doing with embryonic stem cells is by definition an allograft.) So in my mind, you could theoretically create iPSCs from one person and make DP cells for maybe tens or hundreds. This would reduce the cost substantially.

Cal:

I’ve read previously (on this board) that even transplants tend to thin out with time. Also, what about the additional factor that transplants go beyond mere regenerative or neo-genic cell injections–we’re adding much more tissue that contributes to the success of the transplanted hairs’ survival in a new region at the outset.

I think of it as transplanting an entire potted plant–as opposed to planting seeds–from a green house to a desert. How long with the potted plant survive? Will the seeds ever really amount to anything worthwhile?

HT grafts can indeed thin over time. But I’m not satisfied that this isn’t due to explainable factors.

Donor-area thinning from older age is a much bigger factor than the HT world wants to admit because of its implications for that procedure. If it thins when it’s in the original location then it’s sure going to thin in the transplanted location too.

Susceptibility to MPB is not a black-and-white question. It is all shades of gray. If you have big susceptibility on the top half of your head then the bottom half is probably more susceptible than many non-balders too.

The older mini-grafts had problems with the hairs in the middle dying out too (“donut-ing”). But IMHO such a big difference between the hairs just a millimeter or two apart implies some kind of mechanical issue. Maybe lack of blood flow because of how the procedure is done, etc.

Replicel -

If the skin’s post-MPB changes pose a problem for cellular HM growth, then I suspect that getting a light pass of HT grafts into the area ahead of time might help a lot.

When guys want a super-dense HT on long-balded skin, I think it’s reckless to try for more than 2/3rds density in the first pass because of this. The skin needs time to increase the blood flow & recover from the HT trauma. Too much implantation at once is asking for graft survival trouble.

You’re assuming there is something toxic or inherently deadly to hair follicles in the tissue of the balding area? OK, then what is it? I’ve never heard such a thing described, in all the reaearch papers I’ve read. Do you mean fibrosis?

State-of-the-art follucular transplants (FT) transplant almost nothing but the follicle or follicular unit itself, with almost no surrounding tissue. That’s the whole point. And I haven’t seen any research or statements by HT doctors that FUs are any less viable than old-fashioned HT plugs which moved substantial scalp tissue with the follicles.

I mean other than circulating DHT, of course… And if the new follicles are derived from non-balding cell lines, you’re protected from that anyway.