Hair raising breakthrough in genetic engineering

Generations before you saw milestones as well, like the first lab cultured hair cell to show growth in mice. They saw actual clinical trials from Intercytex and the likes and many truly believed that the cure was around the corner using the exact same rhetoric that you are using right now. And looking back, we all know what became of that.

I’m not even sure if I share your views of it merely being a matter of 8-10 years for a true cell based treatment to come to fruition. I think people do not understand that there still is MUCH to overcome, i.e. the hairs being so microscopic that they do not even break through the skin, hair direction, texture, density, etc. It could be another 5 years or it could be another 20 years before they make the breakthrough discovery which gets these cultures to grow cosmetically viable hair. It really comes down to a guessing game and usually in this field of research pessimists have always seemed to be on the winning side.

I hate to be such a downer but thats the way I currently see it. Also I have more faith in things like donor doubling (which I see as being something that could maybe be addressed with better FUE techniques, i.e. use of robots or that piloscope thingi).

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by Lindo[/postedby]

Yup, we’re looking at 8-10 years. Guys like Freddy will say “but it always will be a decade”. But they ignore current milestones and recent breakthroughs. At this point is just about optimizing the process, figuring out the intrinisic hair properties and testing safety in human trials, which might start in 1-2 years already. (Tsuji lab said 3 years a year ago and Jahoda’s group said they felt confident to start ‘soon’ too).[/quote]

Hairman2, you’re talking about the hairs that Jahoda’s group created. The hairs that Tsuji labs created looked a lot better from a cosmetic point of view.

More research is certainly needed. And I understand where you’re coming from. But again, 4 groups of researchers who all independently generated hairs from cells, that’s a HUGE milestone, regardless how you look at it. The future, when you think in a 10 years timespan, looks brighter than ever.

The future looks bright in about 10-15 years IF there are literally no more trouble spots along the way to the mass market. One more significant complication and this could be 15-20+ years.

The last 20 years is littered with breakthroughs in tissue engineering. What has it done for the average middle-class man on the street as of 2014? If my tooth gets rotten they still fill it with metal. If my hand gets gashed they still stitch & bandage it up and send me out the door with a wound that will leave a big scar. If they need bone or cartilage or skin tissue to repair something serious, they still hack it out of somewhere else on my body to get it. If a woman wants her tits bigger they still put two bags of silicone under her skin.

Laboratory advancements in this stuff generally does not mean we have more real world options. Not in the next few decades.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Laboratory advancements in this stuff generally does not mean we have more real world options. Not in the next few decades.[/quote]

Hehe you couldnt be more wrong there Cal. This group of scientist are planning to enter the ‘real world’ with clinical trials next year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=42dTVVqBg1s

And may I remind you that we already have people since 5 years living with stem cell/lab made trachea’s ? ( Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough: First Tissue-engineered Trachea Successfully Transplanted | ScienceDaily ) The future is here already man. Not ‘in the next few decades’

And this is a HUGE thing too: http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/articles/2013/08/historic-japan-stem-cell-trial-approved#.UpVkIMT_mD8 because iPS cells open the door to a whole new world of possibilities. Keep in mind that Tsuji lab is also looking to see if iPS cells can be used to differentiate into DP cells. If that works out they have solved the hairloss problem. The problem Jahoda is facing is that the cultured DP cells only expressed 22% of the genes. But if iPS cells can be guided to differentiate into DP cells, then that will be 100% gene expression and no more cosmetical problems. And iPS cells can now, with this year’s breakthroughs in that field, be safely and very efficiently expanded (unlike DP cells). A year ago that wasn’t possible. Now it is: Stem cells made with near-perfect efficiency | Nature

Anyway I’m going to stop with my pep talk. It seems people here dont care when REAL scientists are making one breakthrough after another. People here only get excited when some strange wonder doctor from India posts some BS photoshopped pictures :wink:

What are you talking about? Most of the intelligent posters on this forum wrote off Nigam as a charlatan a long time ago. Maybe you missed post after post of criticism against him and his ridiculous photos?

If you think you’ll be getting genetically engineered hair follicles implanted in your head within a 10 yr timeframe, well, i’d say good luck to you. I can’t see how you can rationalize that considering that they’ve not even managed to grow a single cosmetically appropriate follicle yet. Yes they’ve managed to grow something, but, not anything you’d want stuck in your temples.

Let me put it to you this way: If they had a protocol that worked well and grew beautiful, perfect hair follicles, funds and trials all setup and ready to go today - it would still be a 10yr timeframe. With tons of basic research left, its going to be 15-20+ before you’re calling up Rahal for your engineered follicle implants.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by Mr. Z[/postedby]
What are you talking about? Most of the intelligent posters on this forum wrote off Nigam as a charlatan a long time ago. Maybe you missed post after post of criticism against him and his ridiculous photos?

If you think you’ll be getting genetically engineered hair follicles implanted in your head within a 10 yr timeframe, well, i’d say good luck to you. I can’t see how you can rationalize that considering that they’ve not even managed to grow a single cosmetically appropriate follicle yet. Yes they’ve managed to grow something, but, not anything you’d want stuck in your temples.

Let me put it to you this way: If they had a protocol that worked well and grew beautiful, perfect hair follicles, funds and trials all setup and ready to go today - it would still be a 10yr timeframe. With tons of basic research left, its going to be 15-20+ before you’re calling up Rahal for your engineered follicle implants.[/quote]

Not sure what posters you’re talking about, I only saw Nigam fans on this forum till the very last minute. No matter what evidence I presented, they kept believing in that charlatan.

And regarding cosmetically appropriate follicles, that’s just wat Tsuji lab did, remember ? http://www.courant.com/news/nation-world/hc-the-day-in-pictures-20120325-008,0,7757337.photo

The reason the ones from Jahoda weren’t cosmetically appropriate yet is because he, unlike Tsuji, was culturing them and although he was the first to succeed at culturing DP cells without loss of their follicle inducing capability, they only retained 22% gene expression.

If Tsuji lab can induce iPS cells to DP cells, then we are where we want to be. They said they were hoping to start trials in 3 years, which is now almost 2 years ago. They said they were exploring different venues, one of them being iPS.

Anyway I seem to be the only optimist left here. You guys depress me :wink:

Luckily, there is a lot of healthy skepticism about Nigam on this forum, despite a large signal to noise ratio.

After starting to read the forum again, I think it was about 5 minutes from the time I first read about Nigam to the time I realized there was a good chance he was charlatan.

More importantly, talking about something with much more potential, what’s the current story with Tsuji labs? Because the information is so scattered, I had trouble really understanding exactly how far along and what they’ve done.

It looks like they’ve created brand new hair follicles on mice from stem cells. Have they tried anything with humans?

I believe those hairs on the mice are mouse hairs growing on mouse skin, and were generated from mouse stem cells and other mouse cells. They are not using human cells to generate human hairs on human skin that had been grafted onto mice, like Jahoda and Christiano did.

exactly, in fact Jahoda and Christiano pointed out that hair on rodents has been possible for quite a while now. Doing the same on humans however has so far proven to be very difficult.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by roger_that[/postedby]
I believe those hairs on the mice are mouse hairs growing on mouse skin, and were generated from mouse stem cells and other mouse cells. They are not using human cells to generate human hairs on human skin that had been grafted onto mice, like Jahoda and Christiano did.[/quote]

Yes. Doing the exact same experiment on humans – cell culture of human cells implanted into humans – didn’t give good results. But the recent Jahoda/Christiano experiment on mice was actually on human tissue grafted onto mice. The fact that the human tissue is stuck on a mouse’s back is thought to have no influence on the experiment at all. The key difference with the Jahoda & Christiano study that made it work was the 3D cell culture, which had never been tried for this purpose before.

People also have to remember that the ONLY reason they do things like graft human tissue onto a mouse’s back is that they have no permission to test this on actual humans, at this point.

I agree the only difference is that, while the mouse cells grew a nice tick tufft of hair, the human hairs only grew tiny microfollicles which did not even break through the skin. Once I see such a tufft of hair on grafted human skin, I will start getting excited.

[quote]exactly, in fact Jahoda and Christiano pointed out that hair on rodents has been possible for quite a while now. Doing the same on humans however has so far proven to be very difficult.

[postedby]Originally Posted by roger_that[/postedby]

Yes. Doing the exact same experiment on humans – cell culture of human cells implanted into humans – didn’t give good results. But the recent Jahoda/Christiano experiment on mice was actually on human tissue grafted onto mice. The fact that the human tissue is stuck on a mouse’s back is thought to have no influence on the experiment at all. The key difference with the Jahoda & Christiano study that made it work was the 3D cell culture, which had never been tried for this purpose before.

People also have to remember that the ONLY reason they do things like graft human tissue onto a mouse’s back is that they have no permission to test this on actual humans, at this point.[/quote]

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by roger_that[/postedby]
I believe those hairs on the mice are mouse hairs growing on mouse skin, and were generated from mouse stem cells and other mouse cells. They are not using human cells to generate human hairs on human skin that had been grafted onto mice, like Jahoda and Christiano did.[/quote]

Researchers have been able to grow hair on mice for over a decade. The news from Tsuji was a breakthrough 1.5 years ago because it was created from human stem cells. However the resulting follicle wasn’t 100% human cause they used mice cells too.

"Mayumi Ito, a dermatologist at New York University, says that this is the first report to reconstitute hair follicles using human cells. "

http://www.nature.com/news/regenerative-medicine-repairs-mice-from-top-to-toe-1.10472

Both Li’s group and Jahoda’s group did grow 100% human follices on human skin grafted onto a SCID mouse.

Li’s achievement: Human TSC2–Null Fibroblast-Like Cells Induce Hair Follicle Neogenesis and Hamartoma Morphogenesis - PMC

Again, Jahoda followed a different method. Tsuji labs didn’t culture cells, they just took exisiting ones, mixed them into ‘hair germs’ and implanted that onto the mouse. The challenge Tsuji is facing is, just like they note in that article, to find a source of DP cells. They’re looking into several venues, one of them begin iPS cells. So unlike Jahoda, they’re NOT into culturing DP cell (at least not known to the public I think, they might very well be working on it too)

But again, Jahoda’s results were a huge milestone cause they show us that Dp cells can be cultured without losing their follicle inducing capability. But it’s just one possible venue. Another venue is trying to create DP cells from pluripotent cells and that’s what Tsuji is looking into.

Of course nobody can predict when either of those 2 venue’s will yield results. But both Jahoda and Tsuji both said they felt confident they could start clinical trials ‘soon’, so that’s very different from all the negativity that’s been on this forum in the ‘post Nigam’ era :slight_smile: And sorry, what these guys are saying matters a lot more to me than what you guys are claiming :wink: Combine that with the fact that the first ever in history iPS cell trial is now recruiting and that that group of Spanish researchers are planning to start next year with that lab stem cell created skin trial and I just don’t think all the negativity here is justified.

And then there’s also the possibility, at least that’s my speculation, to use stem cells from umbilical cords. Those Spanish researchers managed to induce those cells to become epithelial cells (and grew human skin that way which they want to use in clinical trials next year). It has already been shown before that they can also create mesenchymal cells from umbilical stem cells. And that’s all Tsuji needs. So to me that seems like a viable idea too.

Of course this would bring other problems to the table since the hair wouldn’t be yours, so they’d also need to figure out how to change the characteristics.

I don’t know if these cells can be expanded, if so, then it wouldn’t be a problem. I bet most people would rather have a full head of other people’s hair than a Nw7 with their own, haha :slight_smile:

But in theory I don’t see why this wouldnt be possible. Right now.

Thanks for all the responses. It’s been very helpful in getting a good understanding of what’s going on from “Team Tokyo”.

All looks very promising, though to be honest, years and years away, especially if they are planning to use iPS cells.

This blog below points out how cautiously they are treading in terms of using iPS cells in clinical studies. This particular study will be three years in the running, and they seem to be making a differentiation between this and a clinical trial.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/07/japan-to-start-stem-cell-study-on-humans.html

Yeah it’s the first time ever so great caution will be needed. The first time they started a clinical trial with stem cells (non iPS) they did the same thing, only very few patients were selected and they kept months between injecting each patient.

However that doesn’t mean Tsuji labs can’t do the same. They don’t need to wait for the study to complete. If they book preclinical success and they’re confident it will work, then they can just start themselves. The fact that this particular iPS trial got the green light therefore is a very good sign for them. It went the same way with regular stem cell clinical trials. Companies didnt wait for each other to complete and just a few months after the first company started, the second company followed.

But booking that preclinical success (on SCID mice) would be the first step. We’re not there yet. But again, they said they hoped to start clinical trials in a few years and that was 1.5 year ago.

The results from SCID mice are not entirely trustworthy. Cotsarelis would already be growing good hair on humans if it was an equivalent situation. And I don’t think they ever even figured out what was going wrong that time.

Over the years researchers have regrown hair on mice in hundreds of ways that don’t work on humans. Even SCID mice are not a similar enough testbed to start making assumptions of success. We need live human evidence or we don’t know anything yet.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
The results from SCID mice are not entirely trustworthy. Cotsarelis would already be growing good hair on humans if it was an equivalent situation. And I don’t think they ever even figured out what was going wrong that time.

Over the years researchers have regrown hair on mice in hundreds of ways that don’t work on humans. Even SCID mice are not a similar enough testbed to start making assumptions of success. We need live human evidence or we don’t know anything yet.[/quote]

I think Cotsarelis didn’t use human skin grafted on the back of the SCID mice, that’s the difference. From what I understood, human skin grafted onto a SCID mouse is a fairly accurate human model.

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by Lindo[/postedby]
Yeah it’s the first time ever so great caution will be needed. The first time they started a clinical trial with stem cells (non iPS) they did the same thing, only very few patients were selected and they kept months between injecting each patient.
[/quote]

I guess the question is, how long after the first cautious clinical studies for non iPS stem cells was it before they started allowing trials for problems considered non-threatening to your health, or “cosmetic”?

It’s great news they’re starting using iPS stem cells but it seems like they are being awfully methodical cautious here.

Anyway, obviously, I hope you’re right, and they start sooner, rather than later. Have the Tokyo Team started testing with iPS cells in animal models, or is this just a possibility for a source of the cells?

As for the estimates given by the scientists themselves for when they might start trials, I really don’t put all that much stock in that. I know they mean well, but scientists seem to consistently low-ball them, often significantly.