Someone posted this on Feb. 2 on another website:
“I received an email from Dr. Xu at Upenn yesterday, and he said that the people who ran this study [referring to Sanford-Burnham] probably did not read their results correctly, and that the resulting follicles were probably mouse hair and not human hair. He did not explain further, but he is working on the same problems and knows his stuff.”
Remember, the human stem cells that were used in the Sanford-Burnham study, which were converted into hair-inductive dermal papilla like cells, were then injected or implanted into MICE (because they did not have permission yet to put them into humans).
Sanford-Burnham’s reading of their own results was that the resulting hair follicles created were HUMAN follicles, because they were grown as a result of using human cells.
But now Dr. Xu at the University of Pennsylvania is saying something else happened: The human inductive DP-like cells that were implanted into the mice induced new MOUSE follicles to grow, not new HUMAN follicles.
I don’t believe there was anything in the Sanford-Burnham study that indicated they tested the DNA of the follicles to determine whether they were human or mouse follicles.
But, if Dr. Xu is correct, then this might have been a big flaw in the Sanford-Burnham research.
I notice that on the SB blog, “Beaker”, the article about the hair study can still be searched, but they no longer give it prominence. It’s not shown on the homepage of the blog anymore and is pretty hard to find. And the last comment posted by anyone was from August of 2015.
Is this the reason we haven’t heard any news from Sanford-Burnham?