A company called HairClone is developing a business model that skips clinical trials

This is interesting. Check this out. There are a few more hurdles to cross but they are getting off the ground. If we could skip clinical trials then we might be able to purchase an effective cell based treatment shortly after its’ invented. The main delay is waiting for researchers to figure out how to preserve hair inductivity during mass pass culture.

So, there is Paul Kemp on the team. Lead member of once spectacularly failed Intercytex. Having read the article a few times I still can’t figure out what’s the deal. So they haven’t got hair cloning option yet available but they will start culturing one’s follicle cells, so that when that option appears, they will be able to come back and treat you. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they haven’t got the product and will start accepting payments?

Paul Kemp was involved with Intercytex and he’s involved with HairClone. He tried in good faith to bring Intercytex to market but the treatment was ineffective. Now he’s trying a new strategy. Is that necessarily a bad thing? If someone tries and fails does that mean we should automatically assume the worse of the person?

A lot of hair research teams have failures in their pasts. Dr. Jahoda initially discovered that injecting cells would grow hair. Everyone thought this would solve the problem. They didn’t understand the hair inductivity issue at first.They had to learn about it through failure. Does this make them bad people? Of course not. For researchers failures are opportunities to learn things.

I see no reason to give them money to bank cells. But I can understand why some people might think it’s a good idea. A cure could be 10 years away. I myself think the cure will get here in 1 - 3 years and if I’m right then I don’t need banked cells for later use. At least not yet.

But even if Replicel works a little better than current treatments what if we need follow-up injections every few years? If that’s the case I might want cells banked so I could get more cells from storage instead of extracting more follicles. If HairClone starts growing hair on people’s heads I will get the treatment and I will bank cells in case I need them in the future. Also, I think Replicel also plans to bank patient cells.

Also, enough baldness treatments have failed to teach us that the treatments in the present pipeline could fail and then some of us might wish we had some cells banked because scientists would have to go back to the drawing board and it could take another 10 years to find a cure.

I think we should make sure this is on the up-and-up before putting one cent into the company but I don’t think we should assume the worse yet. I’m going to send them a very direct email asking them why they’re already trying to bank cells for income. That’s the only thing they’re saying/doing so far that’s giving me any red flags.

I went to their site to try to contact them but their contact link isn’t working. Does anyone have any idea how I can contact these people by email? I would like to inform them that soliciting customers for cell banking seems peculiar at this time. I also think it’s early for them to be doing that but I would like to give them a chance to respond and I can’t reach them. I did get the below information off their site.

HomeHair Follicle Banking

There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence that would indicate that hair cells and hair transplant quality decreases with age. Harvesting and banking hair cells at early age may preserve high cell potency for future uses. The steps from hair donation to cell cryopreservation are already developed so banking now puts patients “first in line” for transplantation of their hair cells when the hair cloning process is fully developed.

Our Hair Follicle Banking Service

HairClone will soon offer a hair follicle banking service which will allow clients to store a small number of hair follicles for future expansion. Approximately 50 follicular units will be collected in a short procedure using the FUE system and transported to a licensed cell bank for long term storage at -197 C until some of the cells are needed for expansion. They would then be returned to the clinic for micro-injection into the scalp.

Using this system, only one surgical procedure would be needed and cells would be available to rejuvenate hair as needed. For more information, please contact us.

What is the benefit of banking?

The HairClone concept will not stop the underlying thinning process so will need to be repeated every 2-3 years in order to maintain hair density as the patient’s own hair thins.

The banking activities could start within a year and will create a patient pool and short-term revenue to the company which will help support the clinical and product development and bring it closer to clinical reality. The banking will allow as well development of licensed GMP processes ahead of marketing license for the expanded cell therapy which would be regulated by the European Medicine’s Agency (EMA) as an Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) and By the U.S’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a Biologic.

Exciting and rapid progress in developmental biology will provide the scientific basis for this ground breaking new treatment and we expect that this could be in the clinic within the next few years although it will take several years before it is fully licensed around the world.

They are not officially in business yet, still raising capital, I suspect.

I agree with you jarjar on this. In no way I want to demean P.Kemp’s or K. Washenik’s good efforts to bring this procedure to us. But we must be honest, in the end it was a failure. Never mind.
The way I see it, P.Kemp is going to open up old and dusted Intercytex protocols and offer it as a filling-in option along with HT. Or, they would be seeking to buy a license from Replicel or Shiseido to administer treatment in the U.K, provided Replicel’s due data is worthy, and provided Replicel would be interested in selling the license.

@jarjarbinx Why getting excited over this? They don’t even have a proven treatment yet, like you said, we have no clue what kind of treatment they are selling down the road and how well it works. Too may unknowns.

This is exciting because it means we might be able to get technology early by a year or two.

It looks to me like HairClone is analyzing available information regarding ALL of the existing cell based technologies AND watching for new advances in DP cell hair inductivity, Replicel/Shiseido sheath cell technology, and ALL other cell based hair growth technologies.

It looks like as soon as the bugs are worked out of one of these technologies Hairclone intends to rapidly start offering that technology commercially without waiting for clinical trials to finish or standard approval. It looks like they’re planning to use the UK version of the Compassionate Use Program to do this.

I think the reason they’re talking about starting commercial procedures as quickly as late 2017 (yes this year or possibly early next year) is because they want to see what new cell based hair growth information is disclosed at the October Hair Loss Congress. DP cell researchers will probably have new info about DP hair cell inductivity, Replicel/Shiseido should have new information about sheath cell hair growth technology, and other researchers will present new information about their latest cell based hair growth technologies.

HairClone would have to work out an agreement with the owners of whichever cell-based technology they opted to use but I think that is doable because if the owner allows HairClone to use his the owner could start making profits sooner.

If you think about the hair research environment you’ll realize that researchers s/b closing in on a breakthrough and HairPrime will try to use that tech right away rather than waiting for completion of clinical trials and standard approval.

I think you’re right. I think HairClone figures that cell-banking potentially provides a benefit to the customer and the company can earn some operating revenue by performing the cell-banking.

I think that right now most of us would snicker at the idea of paying for cell-banking at this stage of the game but I also think that in a year or two we may all want to do it. I’m still not ready to do it just yet. I want to let a little more time go by.

But they do raise a good point that hair cell quality worsens over time so the longer we wait to bank hair cells the worse the quality of those cells will be. And once the cells are frozen they retain the quality they had at the time of freezing.

Aren’t we making a gigantic assumption that whatever cells we are banking will definitely be suitable for use in the future? HairClone could be banking the wrong type of cells and it will be years or decades before we know they are useless. I am not sold.

Who’s we? I’m not making that assumption. I’m not banking any cells at this time. I’m waiting for more information. I think it’s too early to bank cells for a number of reasons, including your point that we aren’t sure yet which cells should be banked. If they do find a cell-based cure for hair loss then I would want to bank cells so I don’t have to keep getting follicles harvested but IMO it’s not time yet.I understand that they want to bank cells for people because it helps them get revenue to operate but it’s still to early to bank cells IMO.

Agreed, this is definitely being done first as a revenue source.