Hello from Trey (early 2000\'s)

Stem cell; cell based hair therapy
1

Hello all,

I was a regular on this forum from about 2000 to 2004. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since I was last on here. Back then we were looking at some crazy things like Dr. Sanhouri and PEZ and other things. I remember that Dr. Gho was “just around the corner” with his procedure and even then we were talking about Dr. Christiano, Dr. Washenik, Dr. Cotsarelis, etc. and how they were right on the edge. Man, it’s amazing that 10 years have gone by. I’ve since shaved my head completely and am comfortable with it, but am curious about the latest advances.

I remember Maneless and Pants and JTR (John the Revelator) and James Bond and Cueball, and TK (stormtrooper number) and Iron Duke and Tyler Durden and many others. Are any of these guys still here?

What’s the outlook now?

God bless!

Trey

2

Hey man.

You would be depressed to see how little has advanced since then. Lots of talk and lots of money being spent to put things in trials but no practical commercially-sellable results.

Ken Washenik was in charge of the Aderans project. They dumped way over $100 million bucks into trying to boost thinning hair with multiplied dermal papillae cells. It did work but it was too weak & inconsistent for a marketable product. There were (still are) some other outfits doing similar things base on DP cells but if Aderans failed then there is no reason to think they will do better.

Jahoda & Christiano are still working and they are our best bet for a future solution. They have actually come a long way in the last decade but they aren’t anywhere near commercial yet.

Gho has been doing the same crap for 15+ years now. He has some cheerleaders and he periodically makes a push that he can offer hair patients more hair than they started with. His stuff does work on paper to some extent but not in practical use.

Dr. Cotsarelis publishes some new revolutionary-sounding discovery about the mechanics of hair functioning & loss about once every 4 or 5 years. It never has any practical use and it’s also several years behind where he currently is. He’s just keeping his name highly respected enough to try to pull venture capitalist dollars for the “Follica” outfit that he works with. The interesting thing about this deal is that if it did work, it would probably work by dermabrading the scalp and then tricking the body into making its own new hair follicles. They actually have learned enough to coax the skin into producing lots of new vellus follicles. But they can’t make the new follicles terminal yet, and there is no reason think they are very close.

I can think of one real change in this area of science from 10-15 years ago. We no longer have concerns about the growth direction & characteristics of any “cloned” or “multiplied” hair. All the stuff being played with these days seems to have those concerns handled in some way or another. The characteristics of the new hair being produced will be determined by your own DNA, and the direction will be either done that way or else be manually implanted in some form by technicians. No more concerns about wrong-colored wrong-textured hair sticking out at random angles.

Transplants:

Remember the “FUE” hair transplants that were being played with in the early 2000s? Where the doc extracts 1-4 hair grafts individually with a tiny hole-punch type of tool, for very small little dot-scars instead of the “shotgun” effect from mini-grafting or the long line scars from strip?

This has become commonplace. From the “top docs” the results have become pretty consistent and FUE is capable of offering results rivaling strip. FUE is no longer quite as expensive as it once was but prices are still way over strip prices.

Scarring from FUE work is getting very well controlled. It usually leaves just a bunch of small pale dots for scarring, like a bunch of freckles. You can shave down with a pretty low razor guard number before anything shows at all.

3

Cal!

Thanks for the update, man. Wow. I will have to admit that seeing the little change in the past 10-15 years is discouraging. I remember how we posted updates constantly and so many things were “just around the corner,” and if anyone said something was still “5 or 10 years off” it seemed like an eternity, but now looking back, that timeframe would have meant that the world would have a cure by now. Hmmmmmm……

Are most of the guys I mentioned gone from this forum now? I think I saw a James Bond post on a thread a day or two ago.

I must say that when I read Jarjarbinx’s posts they remind me of some of my own. Seems like a very good guy and of course very enthusiastic for a cure.

Like I said, I shave my head completely now and am fortunate enough to have a head shaped where it looks decent. Thanks to “The Rock” and Vin Diesel and others the shaved look seems to be more and more of an option (a bulked up body seems to go best with a shaved head, though).

Again, thanks for the update, Cal. Not sure if I will be posting as much these days as in the early 2000’s, but I do pray for the guys (and gals) on these forums because I know that hair loss can be a very serious thing for those going through it, even though others who are NOT going through it can just downplay it or make jokes about it. I will have to say, I reached a point where it no longer really bothered me that much and focused on other things, but of course I am married already. It’s a lot tougher for guys out there in the dating world, trying to find a mate.

Hang in there, guys. i think this forum can, if nothing else, be therapeutic for those who come here, knowing that others are in their same boat.

God bless,

Trey

4

I am new here I am not sure if I want to spend 10 years of my life here, it’s depressing.

5

I think out of all of these, the wounding+topical holds the most promise. We can grow vellus hairs, I think at this point it is a question of finding out how to make them terminal…

6

Besides Aderans, Intercytex (a public company in the UK) was also one of our favorites and it went out of business as well, so yeah, things are not looking good at all.

7

My view is that the wounding accomplishes the EXACT SAME thing as injecting the proper activated stem cells (and/or transit amplifying cells or TACs which are derivatives of activated stem cells)… So that, if we could legally culture and inject these stem cells and stem cell derivatives (like AAPE), we would not need wounding.

The wounding is biochemically doing the exact same thing as the stem cells would, in fact, injecting the actual stem cells (or TACs) would be much better.

I believe that the only reason some researchers are still pursuing the wounding angle at all, is because they know they are pretty much barred from using stem cells or TACs, without having to undergo a long, expensive fight to get authorization.

Wounding is the poor substitute for stem cells.

So, which would you rather have – the weaker answer, which is wounding, or the stronger answer which actually works by the same biochemical mechanism as the stem cells, but doesn’t work as well as stem cells would?

8

Well, given the rate at which HL research advances, let’s focus on the one that is more realistic.

9

We have seen a lot more results on live humans’ heads from wounding than from anything else.

Stem cells might work. But wounding more than might work, it DOES work. At least under just the right circumstances.

10

If wounding worked then Cotseralis would have brought it to market by now. He’s tried so many combinations involving wounding and apparently none of them are satisfactory. It’s time to move on to growth factors and/or stem cells.

11

Hey Trey, do you remember Bryan Shelton? He passed away not too long ago. It’s sad that someone who put in so much effort into the hairloss community didn’t even live long enough to see anything better than minox or fin.

12

Wounding does work. It has worked multiple times in the past. It’s only a matter of time before it accidentally works again.

We may never be able to figure out exactly how it’s happening and us it to our advantage. But that does not invalidate the principle. It does work under certain circumstances. It works no matter how misleading, useless, or plain old frustrating it might be to the MPB research world. It works no matter who it might cause to look stupid in the process. It still works.

13

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Hey man.

You would be depressed to see how little has advanced since then. Lots of talk and lots of money being spent to put things in trials but no practical commercially-sellable results.

Ken Washenik was in charge of the Aderans project. They dumped way over $100 million bucks into trying to boost thinning hair with multiplied dermal papillae cells. It did work but it was too weak & inconsistent for a marketable product. There were (still are) some other outfits doing similar things base on DP cells but if Aderans failed then there is no reason to think they will do better.

Jahoda & Christiano are still working and they are our best bet for a future solution. They have actually come a long way in the last decade but they aren’t anywhere near commercial yet.

Gho has been doing the same crap for 15+ years now. He has some cheerleaders and he periodically makes a push that he can offer hair patients more hair than they started with. His stuff does work on paper to some extent but not in practical use.

Dr. Cotsarelis publishes some new revolutionary-sounding discovery about the mechanics of hair functioning & loss about once every 4 or 5 years. It never has any practical use and it’s also several years behind where he currently is. He’s just keeping his name highly respected enough to try to pull venture capitalist dollars for the “Follica” outfit that he works with. The interesting thing about this deal is that if it did work, it would probably work by dermabrading the scalp and then tricking the body into making its own new hair follicles. They actually have learned enough to coax the skin into producing lots of new vellus follicles. But they can’t make the new follicles terminal yet, and there is no reason think they are very close.

I can think of one real change in this area of science from 10-15 years ago. We no longer have concerns about the growth direction & characteristics of any “cloned” or “multiplied” hair. All the stuff being played with these days seems to have those concerns handled in some way or another. The characteristics of the new hair being produced will be determined by your own DNA, and the direction will be either done that way or else be manually implanted in some form by technicians. No more concerns about wrong-colored wrong-textured hair sticking out at random angles.

Transplants:

Remember the “FUE” hair transplants that were being played with in the early 2000s? Where the doc extracts 1-4 hair grafts individually with a tiny hole-punch type of tool, for very small little dot-scars instead of the “shotgun” effect from mini-grafting or the long line scars from strip?

This has become commonplace. From the “top docs” the results have become pretty consistent and FUE is capable of offering results rivaling strip. FUE is no longer quite as expensive as it once was but prices are still way over strip prices.

Scarring from FUE work is getting very well controlled. It usually leaves just a bunch of small pale dots for scarring, like a bunch of freckles. You can shave down with a pretty low razor guard number before anything shows at all.[/quote]

hello,
nice post.
but… where is histogen in the story ?.
is it so badly dead that is not even worth mentioning ?

14

[quote]If wounding worked then Cotseralis would have brought it to market by now. He’s tried so many combinations involving wounding and apparently none of them are satisfactory. It’s time to move on to growth factors and/or stem cells.

[postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]

Wounding does work. It has worked multiple times in the past. It’s only a matter of time before it accidentally works again.

We may never be able to figure out exactly how it’s happening and us it to our advantage. But that does not invalidate the principle. It does work under certain circumstances. It works no matter how misleading, useless, or plain old frustrating it might be to the MPB research world. It works no matter who it might cause to look stupid in the process. It still works.[/quote]

Wounding does work, but as you said it’s all been by accident so far. No one knows exactly what conditions are required for wounding to precipitate new hair growth. Most likely it is somehow releasing chemicals that activate the dormant HF stem cells (which exist even in bald and balding people) and turns them into progenitor cells or Transit Amplifying Cells (TACs). But no one knows how or what chemical signals are generated, although there are suggestions that it has something to do with activating the Sonic the Hedgehog gene.

To me, it would be much more efficient if we could just: (1) isolate those chemicals, synthesize them, and inject or apply them to the scalp; or (2) even better, culture activated stem cells or TAC cells and inject them.

Wounding works under unspecified ideal conditions, but it is a sub-optimal solution. It’s just a small hint of what we might really have if more research is done into the role of stem cells in this phenomenon.

Wounding is a conscious “workaround” pursued by scientists because the real avenue to generate new follicles – using stem cells and their derivatives – is mostly off-limits due to regulatory issues. There is an almost blanket prohibition on this type of research, especially for cosmetic procedures like hair loss, and for non-homologous uses of stem cells, unless you can get past difficult and costly regulatory hurdles. So researchers like Cotsarelis are forced to pursue lines of research that were not prohibited. Hence the interest in wounding.

I don’t think we should put all our eggs into the basket of a wounding “cure”, but just use the wounding phenomenon as something to study to gain insight into what really generates new hair.

I think we have a better chance at a cure by either pushing for deregulation of stem cell research in the US, or going elsewhere for stem cell therapy and encouraging researchers in stem cell “friendly” jurisdictions to continue to pursue and perfect their work.

15

Hi Trey, weren’t you one of the WSMR trialists ???
I remember we got pretty excited about that for a while but it turned out to be BS as usual :slight_smile:

Not much has changed as has been stated, I remember “within 5 years” was well established even then but progress has been borderline non-existent, I come on here just to give an opinion and see what is up - like you I shave down and it’s OK - not great but OK.

James Bond is definitely still around, but I haven’t seen any of the others you mentioned for a looooong time - as mentioned above Bryan passed away :frowning:

Anyway it was good to hear from you again :slight_smile:

16

[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Dr. Cotsarelis publishes some new revolutionary-sounding discovery about the mechanics of hair functioning & loss about once every 4 or 5 years. It never has any practical use and it’s also several years behind where he currently is. He’s just keeping his name highly respected enough to try to pull venture capitalist dollars for the “Follica” outfit that he works with. The interesting thing about this deal is that if it did work, it would probably work by dermabrading the scalp and then tricking the body into making its own new hair follicles. They actually have learned enough to coax the skin into producing lots of new vellus follicles. But they can’t make the new follicles terminal yet, and there is no reason think they are very close.
[/quote]

You seem to have lost faith in Cotsarelis :stuck_out_tongue:

Keep in mind a couple of things:

  1. Cotsarelis is trying to understand various possible ways to grow (and stop) hair follicles, both of which have multi-billion dollar markets. However he (probably because of Follica) seem to be more interested in approaches that can be addressed using already FDA approved drugs. Good thing with this approach is that as soon as they figure it out, they can quickly trial and bring it to the market. Of course, us forum members will be able to read patents and experiment ourselves early-on as well :slight_smile:

  2. Do Not base your opinion of Cotsarelis on the frequency of his publications. Even in Academia, there is a tendency to hold onto to potentially viable scientific/research findings either till it’s patented or it’s studied further for commercial purposes. I can assure you that Cotasrelis has been pretty busy with his graduate students and they might already have made some new findings, but they could just be holding on to those to stay competitive.

17

Skywalker!

Yes, I was part of that trial and yes, it was yet another in a LONG sting of disappointments. I don’t even remember that researcher’s name, it’s been so long (as I said, 10 years). I think that once I started shaving my head down and realizing that it looked decent (the “Rock” and Vin Diesel are helping that) I slowly stopped checking Hairsite and other hair loss forums.

It started to matter less and less to me as I got used to the shaved look and as I focused more on helping others. Still, I know people suffer from this condition and I am particularly concerned about the young guys, just getting into the serious dating-for-an-eventual-mate time of their lives and dealing with this. CONFIDENCE is huge and can overcome a lot of what we deal with. Still that’s easier said than done, sometimes, I realize.

I pray for everyone going through this and would love to see a cure/treatment that truly WORKS happen very soon.

Thanks for all the updates, everyone.

Trey

18

Yes, I DO remember him! Wow. So sad to hear. He did a lot, that’s for sure!

God bless,

Trey