Dr Terskikh: Unlimited "Natural Looking" Hair

It’s a good news. But…“The current protocol relies on mouse epithelial cells combined with human dermal papilla cells.”
So they know how to manufacture DP cells from iPSc. Now they have to do the same with human epithelial cells.
Plus it’s imuno deficit mouse. And also I did not find whether fully functional hair means terminal hair.

“Natural looking” + “fully functional” sounds pretty close to terminal hair.

Immune deficit mice are necessary because they’re using human cells in the mice. If they used mice with normal immune systems, the human cells would be rejected and the scientists couldn’t do this experiment. But notice that Dr Terskikh says this technique will allow them to do “allogenic” transplants - taking cells from one person and implanting them to another to grow hair. That’s a pretty big deal.

I ain’t from Missouri, show me! I want to see hair on a human scalp… The best hope about this article is I not reading " more studies are needed".

According to Stemson Therapeutics their first human trials will start around January 2021. They didn’t say yet where these trials will be done, but I suspect they will be in Japan.

It appears this link is a year old. Maybe 7 years from now we will something that actually works?

I agree with Superhl that this article looks like it’s a year old. If the article is a year old then the research team may have already fallen behind their Jan 2021 timeline to start human trials. Are you sure they’re still on track for a January 2021 start date for human trials?

If they are then this is really good news because this tech resolves the hair inductivity problems that have plagued cell-based therapies to treat hair loss since forever so it might actually work.

Roger, In the article below the leadership of Stemson Therapeutics say that it could take decades for the treatment to reach the marketplace.

The link is a year old, but in the Atlantic Monthly story on July 25, 2019 Stemson CEO Geoff Hamilton says they expect to start human clinical trials in “about a year and a half” (from then) so that would put them at about Jan 2021.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/594826/

@jarjarbinx It’s not the leadership of Stemson Therapeutics who says it will take “decades” to reach the market, it is a HAIR TRANSPLANT SURGEON, Dr Bassin, who is not connected with Stemson. (Note that Dr Terskikh from Stemson is also quoted, but he just says “years”.)

Practically every time the media does a story on some hair loss breakthrough, they interview one of the researchers working on the new development, and then they ALSO interview a regular hair transplant doctor who has nothing to do with the research, and is just included as an outside observer.

Almost every single time without fail, the outside hair transplant doctor will be quoted as saying the new procedure will reach the market in “decades” or at some unknown date far in the future. If the HT surgeon is only given the opportunity to say two sentences in the article, one of those sentences will always be something to the effect that it will take a very long time to become available, usually something like “decades”.

OK thanks.

But where does it say that Stemson’s treatment is going to be in human studies in January 2021? I haven’t seen that anywhere. And if they did say they plan to start human trials in January 2021 are they still on track to do that?

In the Atlantic Monthly article that I posted above from July 2019, they say 1.5 years from that date to trials. True, that timeline may have changed since then, but that is what they were saying at the time. I guess they have probably been slowed down a bit due to Covid19

I don’t want to split hairs but could they be talking about testing the scaffold rather than the actual treatment? I don’t know. And I think that Christiano also recently invented some sort of scaffold, didn’t she?

Man, I hope you’re right about a Jan 2021 start for human trials.

And I don’t know why Covid - 19 could delaying things to a large extent because the kind of stuff to be done before a trial starts would not require actual test subjects (patients) or anything like that. The kind of stuff that would need to be done before starting the human trial would mostly be getting set-up, back-and-forth communications with relevant regulatory agencies, and stuff like that. I would imagine that Covid-19 might only have a small impact on those kinds of things.

I think most “non-essential” academic and commercial laboratory research work has “gone silent” during the pandemic. This means that if the lab work is not about curing people and saving lives NOW (like in a hospital), the lab work is simply not getting done. Research scientists except for those working on stuff like a Covid-19 vaccine, are working at home not in their labs. I would expect that even cancer researchers are staying home, because cancer is not an acute disease like Covid is. When scientists work at home they are just doing administrative work and answering emails on their computers, they are not doing actual lab work.

And the work still needed on things like Stemson’s project, continues to require a lot of lab work. They are not nearly done with the lab work necessary to get this thing ready to go into human trials. That’s why I think there will continue to be a hold-up until this thing is over.

Terskich & Co are not far from a decade into this research.
The news came in 2015 about this phenomenon.
So they must have started compiling article back in 2014. And their work probably started in 2013.
So they are not far from hitting a decade. Terskich is closing in on a decade of research.
But I think he holds realistic chance of real, affordable treatmetment unlike all others so far.

And he wasn’t even working on this at first. He stumbled on the discovery while working with neurological cells.

Otter and Roger, I hope you guys are right about the nearness of Stemson’s human trials. That would be incredibly exciting. And I still think the idea that Covid-19 will substantially slow down the start of human studies isn’t well-founded. Consider these facts:

  1. Covid - 19 has been an issue in the western world for about 6 months.

  2. There are already very promising treatments in phase 3 studies right now and more in phase 2 and phase 1 studies.

  3. Medicines that are already FDA approved are being tested right now as possible treatments. Since they’re already FDA approved that means that if one of them proves to be the silver bullet it will start being used right away the same as Dexamethasone is already being used to treat some Covid-19 patients. Dexamethasone is beneficial for some patients but it isn’t the silver bullet for everyone.

  4. Promising vaccines are about to start getting into phase 3 studies.

I think that promising"medicine" that can protect virtually everyone from Covid-19 could start hitting the market within 2 - 3 months. That means that Covid-19 will have been a big problem in the Western World for about 9 total months. And just because Covid-19 will have been a big problem in the Western World for about 9 months doesn’t mean everything connected to hair loss research has come to a complete stop during that period. For example, Histogen is moving forward with its’ HSC right now even though the pandemic is ongoing. I’m thinking that Stemson Therapeutics is doing things to make it possible for them to hit the ground running when the Western World gets Covid-19 under control in a few months. Remember, Stemson is competing against other companies to get to the finish line first. I don’t think they’ve been sitting on their hands.

@jarjarbinx

While I think the headline I’m posting below is a big exaggeration - the pandemic is not going to threaten a whole “generation” of scientific research - I definitely think it is having a big impact slowing down all “non-essential” research (which would include hair loss research), because researchers are simply not going to their labs to work - they are doing administrative work at home… Definitely take a look at this -

And, there are A LOT of other articles on the web which back this up, just do a good search for “research laboratories” + pandemic or Covid-19 and you’ll see that every story backs this up.

As far as Stemson goes, I think at this point they are not yet finished with ALL their lab work. I definitely don’t think they’ve reached the point where the only work they have left to do on the applications for human trials is just administrative paperwork. Maybe someone can prove me wrong, but that’s the strong impression I’ve got so far.