Follica website updated

Enjoy

Has the home skin disruption device actually been tested for efficacy, or do they just “think” it’ll work?

Wow, a very bold statement from their website, they seem pretty confident.

“THE DOGMA WAS THAT YOU WERE BORN WITH THE TOTAL NUMBER OF HAIR FOLLICLES THAT YOU WERE EVER GOING TO HAVE. THEIR LOSS WAS CONSIDERED PERMANENT. NOW, WE KNOW IT’S NOT.”

Anyone want to guess what the ingredient entails for the home use application? SETIPIPRANT?

So I guess this will be the big test of Follica’s wounding concept. If the device makes hair grow faster, thicker, etc. maybe they’ll be able to declare it a success.

Interesting business strategy to possibly snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.

Seriously, Follica is like the zombie company that never dies.

Personally, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to prove that this will create enough new hairs to make a big visible cosmetic improvement.

If this works, they should post some pictures of before and after. If they can grow just one terminal hair, then they should be able to grow a thousand hairs. They have this and that but still no pictures.

Superhl, I don’t think that it follows that if using this device grows one hair, then it will grow thousands. I think the wounding phenomenon is heavily dependent on local signaling environment in the skin, whether miniaturized and microscopic hair follicles are still intact, etc.

All this can vary from person to person, and not only that, I think all these variables can be different from one follicle on a person’s scalp to another. That’s why the phenomenon of wounding causing hair growth is so unpredictable. It’s completely dependent on a lot of conditions which we just can’t see, let alone control.

Wounding results aren’t that unpredictable. They are predictably successful at producing a lot of very tiny barely-existent hairs. It gives a few scattered terminals too.

Follica can factually claim to produce a lot of “follicles” - but try pressing them about how many of those follicles are actually terminal hairs and see how forthcoming & confident they sound.

They have not made any real progress until they demonstrate an improvement over the dermabrasion step alone. Until they give a back-to-back comparison of wounding alone versus whatever else they offer, they are basically just selling patented sandpaper.

Follica may be able to get away with selling glorified sandpaper, though. Wounding methods alone DO regrow some hairs, and for decades it has been getting little attention.

Well, this is actually what I meant when I said the results are unpredictable. They may be predictable for getting tiny invisible hairs that no one can see, but they’re unpredictable when it comes to making visible, useful hairs that people will benefit from.

Before you undertake the procedure, you will have no idea if it’ll generate zero terminal hairs, one terminal hair, or 5, or 50. And from what I’ve heard and read, only in the rarest circumstances does it ever result in anything close to a visible cosmetic improvement.

Usually what happens is you dermabrade an area, and then (maybe) get a few terminal hairs popping up, and over the surrounding area, you still see nothing. And someone else can dermabrade the same balding area on their scalp and get even less than you got – completely zero.

To me, that is precisely the definition of “unpredictable”.

It doesn’t matter that people are getting a lot of invisible hair follicles. How does that help us? And, where’s the research that confirms that, anyway? Has a study ever been done that confirms dermabrading or wounding generates large numbers of invisible or vellus follicles??? I don’t recall hearing about that.

Look at p 102, they claim 1/4 terminal, 3/4 neogenic. Who knows, but it’s interesting.

http://puretechhealth.com/images/investors/Puretech_Pi_e-Prospectus_Final_T08_CNB-v2.pdf

(This is the offering document for Puretech’s IPO).

I referred to the wounding results being “predictable” as a bit of an opinion. It frustrates me how often people are surprised to see wounding cause the slightest hair gains at all.

If you put your arm in the flame of a blowtorch then it would be difficult to predict the exact shape and degree of the burn. But I would still call it “predictable” that a severe burn has been caused.

Superficial wounding --> small hair gains. It is predictable. It should come as no more of a surprise than Minoxidil causing hair gains.

As for the percentage of terminals versus non-terminal hairs produced?

I say the same thing as before. Show me a control group result for Follica’s method of wounding w/o the rest of their newest protocol. Maybe they have made legit progress against MPB or maybe they are selling repackaged dermabrasion.

Fair enough. There is some data out there for a control group of wounding only for what Follica did. Here you go:

Control Group from Follica’s Phase II Trial:

Search for: "8. EXAMPLE: CLINICAL EVALUATION OF INTEGUMENTAL

PERTURBATION ON HAIR GROWTH"



Bingo! Thanks for finding that.

Let’s see what we’ve got here . . . for the dermabrasion + hydrogel alone . . .

Grand total hair increase (vellus + terminals) was 9-10% at 6 months. The vast majority of that was vellus. The terminals ended up 2% above baseline at 6 months. They had been up 13% at 3 months but fell back down.

I wonder what another 6 or 12 months would look like.

If Follica’s treatment can really beat these figures significantly then they might have something big.

Next big question: how compoundable will it be (with a long recovery time between sessions)?

Yeah, it’s very curious how the hair count declines from M3 to M6. Perhaps it has something to do with hair cycling, or it could be a false positive and be a telogen to anagen transition. (Hopefully they’ve ruled that out through testing).

It’s also possible they expect the primitive HF’s to mature with the addition of topicals.

So, we have some data here from some trials that they seemingly did not report before this. Some of the data looks good, but some looks sketchy or worrisome (like, losses on some people of up to 99 hairs).

As for the hairs gained, we really have no idea what they look like visually. It seems the vast majority are vellus. This makes me think of Rogaine, where a similar majority of hairs gained is always vellus, and at the end of the day, after using Rogaine for years, most people still gain only a few terminal hairs, nothing earth-shattering. Maybe this is just a “mechanical” way of simulating the same changes that Rogaine does with a drug.

Have they shown any photos anywhere? Why are they reluctant to show photos if they think this procedure is so promising?

This information was revealed a few years ago from a trial completed in 2011. Follica has never released a single photo and probably never will. This is their policy, there is no point debating that issue.

Honestly, this is a question to think about for cal and all the others who support Follica or think they have a potential answer.

With all due respect to them (and to you guys), what makes you think they’ll succeed in developing some really effective, marketable treatment, when PureTech/Follica have been at it now for well over 10 years, and all they have to show for it to this point, is a device that can make tiny wounds in your scalp (not rocket science, that) and a study that showed they can create a bunch of barely-visible vellus hairs, that mostly dead-end and never get beyond that point?

Rogaine can do this, too.

I mean, I respect everyone’s opinions, but seriously, I have to wonder: if this is the BEST they can do after slogging this idea for 10+ years, meandering around the world with studies like this, conducting secret trials in Germany with wounding plus some chemical that “failed” (their own word, I believe), embargoing all photos of results for some unknown reason, etc., then what about this suggests they’ll ever be able to offer something that will be qualitatively better than the treatments that are already on the market?

Listen, we don’t know if they will succeed. Statistically, they probably won’t. That said, their science is good (which is rare in the world of MPB speculation) and the company seems to have a plan to bring it to market. Whether the results are there is to be seen. There is nothing gained from debating it. That’s all.

As for, “this is the best they can do?”. Remember, their competition isn’t exactly growing lawns on bald heads. MPB research is a joke.

MPB research is a joke because society views it as trivial, and so the FDA would likely not approve a treatment that has any side effects for a condition that is “trivial.”

So big pharma does not want to invest $ because the chances of finding a treatment that has zero side effects is zero.

You all should remember this the next time you say here for all the world to read that MPB is not a serious problem–because by saying that you condemn us to a life of baldness.

I consider MPB to be extremely serious, especially when it strikes a young man.

I only “believe in Follica” to the extent that I’m curious. I’m not utterly dismissive of their chances right out of the gate.

They haven’t released a product in all these years. That could be taken as evidence that they are desperate or it could be that they finally have something.

It’s easier to find evidence of people coming back from the dead, than evidence of MPB reversal. Let that sink in for a minute. We do not have the luxury of treating MPB with the method that we happen to prefer. The problem is too difficult for us to be getting that picky.

Follica?
They have done some pure hair research. They chose a relatively simple method. It is related to the only known examples of cosmetic regrowth in vivo. They have proven almost nothing yet.

Everyone else?
They have done almost no pure hair research. They chose complex methods. No links to any cases of regrowth. They have proven almost nothing yet.