I'm beginning to think a cure is really here

https://www.asianscientist.com/2019/08/in-the-lab/scalable-hair-regeneration-follicle-stem-cells/

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This is getting ridiculous. We now have the following cell-based hair loss treatment in clinical trials or almost in clinical trials.

  1. Tsuji

  2. Stemson

3 HairClone

  1. Invitrohair

I want to see confirmation by pictures of a bald head with real normal hair follicles!! Next, automate the delivery process with robotics. Much like a printer attached to your head. While it takes a surgeon several hours to implant noticeable hair follicles. The right technology to implant thousands of hair in just a few minutes… Question? If they implant 10,000 hairs, will these hairs cycle at the same time?

Don’t forget Dr. Christiano!

The one thing that worries me about that article is at the end it says:

"The researchers’ next step is to find a way to expand the number of hair follicle stem cells available before preparing tissue grafts. Further studies that use hair follicle stem cells derived from patients suffering from hair loss are also required, Fukuda said."

I thought the problem of expanding the number of HF stem cells before preparing tissue grafts was already worked out, at least by Dr. Tsuji. Now Dr. Fukuda is saying they need further studies to do that?

I would think that part is absolutely essential for this kind of treatment to work…

On the other hand, that shouldn’t even be an issue for Stemson, as they are not trying to expand HF stem cells at all. Instead, they’re taking somatic (non-stem) cells from the body, expanding them in culture so there are many of them (if that’s even necessary), and then converting them into induced pluripotent stem cells. So, that’s a way of getting around the problem of expanding the HF stem cells. They just don’t use HF stem cells! (By the way, I remember in one article by Drs Cotsarelis and Garza, they said that culturing HF stem cells was hard to do, and no one at that point - I think early 2000s - had done it.)

It seems to me if Fukuda can’t expand HF stem cells yet, he’s got to get over that hurdle first before he has a workable procedure. I don’t know how long it’ll take him to clear that hurdle but it may be a while… What do you think?

Good catch Roger.

For this type of treatment I think you’re right. I noticed that same quote in the article too but I thought the writer must have misunderstood something or something like that. This treatment is irrelevant compared to the other treatments I alluded to if they still need to find a way to expand cells in culture. I’ll scratch this treatment off my list.

Has Christiano released a paper demonstrating that her cell-based treatment is ready for human trials or nearly ready?

The company she recently founded with Dr Jahoda to pursue this line of research is Rapunzel Biosciences:

But there’s not much at that website. And I don’t know what their latest research has found or if they’ve published any papers validating it lately.