Is anyone aware if this tech is advanced since 2019? Could they use 3-d printing to make 100,000 copies of a single straight hair so all of the hairs on a person’s head would look alike.
The 3d printing idea refers to creating hair follicles by dropping certain amounts of different types of cells into a small mold or receptacle in the proper order from bottom to top. The follicles then generate the hair shafts. I don’t know if it could guarantee that all the hairs would look exactly the same, maybe that would happen if all the conditions were right and the cell numbers were the same each time.
But I think what this guy did is something different, he transplanted hair follicles from one mouse to another and they were not rejected by the recipient mouse’s immune system. He determined that there was no rejection because he removed the dendritic cells from the donor follicles. Dendritic cells are neuron cells (maybe the ones that innevervate the donor follicles’ erector pili muscles) so I assume these cells have donor antigens while the other cells in the follicle don’t.
But if you were to mix hair from someone else with your own hair then the hairs would look different and you would look goofy. In an extreme example imagine if your hair was perfectly straight and they gave you some of my wavy hair. You would literally look foolish.
Yes, if the color, thickness, and waviness of the hair was different fro person to person, it would look weird. But I would assume they’d make an effort to match the two people together, and bank cells from a variety of donors so that the recipient would get hair closely matched to his own.
That’s impossible. Maybe it would be OK in dim lighting but not in good lighting.
@jarjarbinx Yeah I understand, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The more we nit-pick at all the finer details of this, the more we raise expectations to unfulfillable levels, and the longer we’ll have to wait until the product hits the market.
I for one would be 1000x happier having SOME kind of normal or normal-ish looking hair covering my entire scalp with normal or normal-ish density, than to wait for 10 more years to have every tiny detail perfected, with hair that matches my own down to the minutest detail.
Hell, I have different colors of hair on my head right now. Some are auburn, some darker brown, and some are gray at the temples/sideburns. What’s the point of making it all perfectly uniform? And there’s a wide range of thicknesses of my hair shafts as well.
If they can’t perfect it and you’re unsatisifed with hair that doesn’t perfectly match your own, just get it cut really short. Like 1 inch or a half inch or just shave it down to the nub.
At least with the shaved-down look you can still display that you have a full head of hair. A lot of guys with full heads of hair do this right now, it’s somewhat in fashion and it’s a really good look. Not to base everything on what women like but I actually think a lot of women love that look.
Honestly, who gives a crap that all the hairs don’t perfectly match? I’m not trying to get on the cover of GQ.
Really, how practical is this? Imagine we need to look for a donor in order to get our hair back, who wants to give up his hair even for a lot of money?
@Tsla The donor wouldn’t be giving up all his hair, just some healthy donor follicles which are resistant to DHT. In the lab, the DP and other necessary cells would be extracted from the donor’s follicles, multiplied by thousands of times using cell cloning techniques, and then could be used to generate thousands of new follicles which could be then transplanted into the patient’s scalp.
Can’t they just remove a few follicles from your own head, remove cells from your follicles, AND “alter” those cells so they aren’t vulnerable to DHT/Testosterone anymore and then culture them to make more of them and then implant them into your head?
@jarjarbinx Altering the cells is what Stemson Therapeutics is doing when they create induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. Except in that case, it supposedly doesn’t matter if they take the cells from your hair follicles or from another part of your body. Somatic cells from almost anyhwere in your body can be harvested and turned into iPSCs. The iPSCs are then programmed to act like DP cells.
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When Stemson does this do they alter the cells so they aren’t vulnerable to androgens anymore?
I think they’ll still be vulnerable to testosterone since they’d be (in most cases) taking them from a male body and putting them back into a male body, but I think (I’m guessing) their sensitivity to DHT might be governed by the cells in the part of the body they’re taken from. There are 2 known types of DHT receptors in the body, and most parts of the body don’t have them.
Can’t they just take the androgen receptors out or render the androgen receptors inactive? There has got to be a way to make those cells immune to the androgens.
I don’t think you can just strip off the androgen receptors from existing cells. If it could even be done, it would probably damage the cell membrane and maybe even destroy the cells.
Some antiandrogens are true receptor blockers (not like finasteride and dutasteride which are enzyme blockers) and competitively inhibit the androgen receptors so they can’t work. They bind to the receptors and don’t let go, rendering them useless. So DHT can’t bind. But none of these are approved for hairloss - they would have a lot of negative side effects.
Roger, if you’re going to use a true & potent anti-androgen then shouldn’t you just skip the pricey cell-based treatment? A true and potent anti-androgen will give you a full head of hair so if you go that route why bother also doing a cell-based treatment?Really, it’s one or the other, isn’t it? You don’t need both.
If you mean an anti-androgen that would block all androgens 100%, the side effects would be too great. Gynecomastia, loss of libido, shrinkage of testicles, raising of voice pitch. No males would want to take those (I certainly wouldn’t) and they wouldn’t get approved either because of the side effects.
It would be fine to block nearly 100% of androgens as long as it only works in the skin.
But you wouldn’t have to block all androgens 100%, just close to it.
If you used it as a topical, there’s a good chance some of it will be absorbed into the circulatory system and affect the rest of the body. I think that’s why these kinds of anti-androgens haven’t been approved for male patterned baldness.
I was reading recently that some company is working on a potent oral anti-androgen that only works in skin even when taken orally. That would be quite an accomplishment.
Yes, I think it’s a Chinese company. Is it this?