Cal – first of all, I am VERY skeptical about this idea for a lot of reasons.
More than just the nasty side-effects, I think there’s a lack of evidence that this stuff can consistently grow hair, grow it in the right places, and that the hair will remain and cycle after you withdraw the drug. You want to put this stuff on your skin for the rest of your life?
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the unlikelihood of any pharma company pursuing this idea, or the FDA giving the green-light to clinical trials, or approving it for hairloss in the end. Even in the very very unlikely event that they do, the whole process would take a number of years. How is that better than pursuing cell therapy, cell culturing, spheroids, stem cells, etc. which are being investigated by multiple researchers right now?
My main question to you is, why do you keep linking Gefitinib to Cotsarelis’ wounding studies? What’s the connection? Has Gefitinib been found to be particularly effective at growing hair when the skin has been wounded?
The point was never to chronically put Gefintnib onto you head/into your mouth like it’s Fin/Minox. The point was to use it briefly and alter the wound-healing process so that your body would naturally regrow a batch of hair that lasted.
You wouldn’t be staying on any drug. That’s the point. This wasn’t taking a bunch of busted-ass half dead hair follicles at the edge of a bald spot and forcing some more life out of them. It was causing new patches of thick healthy hair shafts (at the wound site, no effect on the rest of your existing MBD-weakened hair) that probably wouldn’t need any help continuing to live on their own.
Gefitnib is one thing we found was linked to the process but that drug is not necessarily the big thing to focus on. There were also cases of it working like I mentioned with no drugs at all, just chronic abrasion in some way. Somehow or another this process can work, we just don’t understand it well enough yet.
So if we don’t understand how to do it what are we supposed to do? Cots knows but he aint talking. We don’t have enough info. What is your suggestion? I’ll be happy to try something if we have enough info to make it worth trying.
[quote]2008 flashback. People, including me, tried it without success.
[postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Bingo.
Roger -
The point was never to chronically put Gefintnib onto you head/into your mouth like it’s Fin/Minox. The point was to use it briefly and alter the wound-healing process so that your body would naturally regrow a batch of hair that lasted.
You wouldn’t be staying on any drug. That’s the point. This wasn’t taking a bunch of busted-ass half dead hair follicles at the edge of a bald spot and forcing some more life out of them. It was causing new patches of thick healthy hair shafts that probably wouldn’t need any help continuing to live on their own.
Gefitnib is one thing we found was linked to the process but that drug is not necessarily the big thing to focus on. There were also cases of it working like I mentioned with no drugs at all, just chronic abrasion in some way. Somehow or another this process can work, we just don’t understand it well enough yet.[/quote]
I don’t have a suggestion on what we should do now, sitting at home, reading online MPB forums.
I just have an opinion. I would rather see more research dollars focused on this method than dumping another $150 million dollars into ARI-style cellular science and hoping all the basic roadblocks can be surmounted.
With the wounding-based science, at least we know without a doubt that the racecar is capable of winning the race if we can get the stupid thing to fire up. And we have seen it fire up briefly with only the tools we already have in our hands today. Whereas with ARI-style cellular science we maybe be chasing our tails trying to make a non-competitive car keep up with the pack for another 10-20 years.
The same as you can say that with wounding based science at least we know without a doubt that the racecar is capable of winning the race I can say that with cell therapy at least the racecar is capable of winning the race too.
For example, we already know that the cells will grow hair because the same as you say that we’ve briefly seen the race car fire up we can also say that we’ve briefly seen the cell-therapy race car fire up as well. We saw the cell therapy race car fire up when Jahoda implanted his own hair cells into his wife’s arm and produced terminal head hairs from his head on her arm.
And the same as you are saying that we just have to figure out the right tools to make wounding work I can say the thing about cell therapy because at least we know what the obstacle is to make the cell therapy treatment work. All we have to do is get 100% of the hair cell genes in culture to express because the cells are losing their inductivity when they’re out of the body too long for culture. They know what the problem is, and they are zeroed in on trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Once they solve that problem hair loss could be cured.
On the other hand, Cots is still trying to figure out why his wounding isn’t producing full thickness hair every time. He’s still looking for a direction. Cell therapy researchers have the direct direction - protect inducitivity for long enough to culture the hair cells sufficiently. And once they accomplish this hair loss is history.
The way I see it is that the hair cell researchers are further along than the wounding researchers, especially when you consider that the hair cell researchers have the great Dr. Nigam on the case who is solving problems by leaps and bounds.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
I don’t have a suggestion on what we should do now, sitting at home, reading online MPB forums.
I just have an opinion. I would rather see more research dollars focused on this method than dumping another $150 million dollars into ARI-style cellular science and hoping all the basic roadblocks can be surmounted.
With the wounding-based science, at least we know without a doubt that the racecar is capable of winning the race if we can get the stupid thing to fire up. And we have seen it fire up briefly with only the tools we already have in our hands today. Whereas with ARI-style cellular science we maybe be chasing our tails trying to make a non-competitive car keep up with the pack for another 10-20 years.[/quote]
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
I don’t have a suggestion on what we should do now, sitting at home, reading online MPB forums.
I just have an opinion. I would rather see more research dollars focused on this method than dumping another $150 million dollars into ARI-style cellular science and hoping all the basic roadblocks can be surmounted.
With the wounding-based science, at least we know without a doubt that the racecar is capable of winning the race if we can get the stupid thing to fire up. And we have seen it fire up briefly with only the tools we already have in our hands today. Whereas with ARI-style cellular science we maybe be chasing our tails trying to make a non-competitive car keep up with the pack for another 10-20 years.[/quote]
Not only that, this seems like the protocol that will work for everybody. The DP/DC cell multiplication is only good for those that have really robust donor. Probably the younger and NW5’s or less. Only, of course, if it is donor independent, but I think that is way too far off.
I agree, the hair cell researchers are currently farther along than the wounding researchers.
And what has this gotten us? When ARI shut its doors they were struggling to make a marketable treatment that boosted dying hairs like Finasteride. Whoopti-sh*t. Did Finasteride end the market for hair transplants?
What if the wounding science had gotten Washenik’s $150 million and decade of investment, instead of what is probably a small fraction of that since 2008?
We might have an FDA-legal (or at least DIY-able) treatment to make NW#7s into full-thickness NW#1s right now. If somebody ever nails this science down then it will probably end up costing very little (could Aderans say that?) and provide an unlimited amount of new full-density hair. It would be a better final result all around.
I’ve been wondering why the cell therapy teams bothered moving forward (intercytex and ARI) without first solving the inductivity problem. It seems to me that they wasted time. Are they just now finding out that they have an inductivity problem when they culture autograft cells? How would they not know this before? How did they not learn this from the pilot study? How did they not know this from phase 1 studies?
I think they kind of knew there was this inductivity issue out there that might be a problem but they were hoping that it would not be a problem when they got into the actual studies.
They were wrong. Murphy’s law: Whatever can go wrong; will go wrong.
The cell researchers definitely know now that the inductivity problem can not be ignored. There is no disregarding it. It has to be dealt with.
So now they’re taking it seriously.
All that having been said, I still fail to see where Cots, or anyone else, has hammered out all of the details of the wounding theory for growing hair consistently. It seems to me that Cots and them have not even figured out what the problem is. This puts them behind the cell therapy researchers because the cell therapy researchers have zeroed-in with certainty on the problem: Inductivity. We all know this is the problem with hair cell therapy to this point in time. Can you tell me what is the specific obstacle that needs to be crossed in order to get wounding therapy to work? Of course not. And neither can Cots. Nobody can. They don’t even know what the problem with wounding therapy is yet.
It’s smarter to put the money into cell therapy. In cell therapy they know what problem needs to be solved.
How do we know the cell inductivity/growth consistency problems can be beaten - EVER? They started this project a decade and $150 million dollars ago. “Some time in the future after a lot of research” is right now. They still can’t make this thing work.
And I still see no evidence that anything like Ji Gami can regrow long-lost hair. Their best results still appear to be reversing the most recently-lost hair, not randomly regrowing hair as you would expect from a true consistency problem. They not only have a consistency problem from patient-to-patient, they also aren’t putting new hair on longtime shiny bald skin even in the successful cases. So far they aren’t really reversing MPB, they are merely stopping it like Fin/Dut does. (For some reason there is an unwritten rule in the HM field that this little complication is to be ignored.)
I am not attempting to explain why they cannot regrow terminal hair on long-balded skin, I am simply pointing out the fact that they cannot. This is the current situation with Ji Gami whether it fits our theories of how it works or not.
We know that wounding can produce thick patches of terminal hair. What little we know about this technique suggests it probably won’t have consistency problems if we actually understood it. A consistency problem wouldn’t produce hundreds/thousands of closely-packed hair follicles.
It doesn’t matter how close a racer can get to the finish line if he cannot cross it. We need a winner. Aderans has come a long way in the race but now they can’t solve a consistency problem. They are also working hard at ignoring a “We can’t retake any lost ground” problem which much more serious IMHO. 1000 years of mankind’s experience with existing MPB treatments suggests that this “lost ground” problem cannot be overcome by any amount of increasing the potency of an existing process. Any treatment that cannot retake lost ground the first time, will not become able to retake lost ground merely by strengthening it. There is something fundamental standing in the way, real world experience says this even if the theories about cell therapy do not.
As I said it looks to me like they are only now taking this inductivity problem super seriously. Let’s wait to see what Dr. Nigam has to say. He may have spoken with Christiano and Jahoda, and they may have some ideas of how to get around this problem. In a recent interview Christiano stated that she/Jahoda had some ideas about perhaps resolving the issue.
They could beat the inductivity problem right NOW if they used allograft cells. I am not saying that they should but the point is that they could and if they did then they could overcome the inductivity issue.
The fact still remains that at least in cellular therapy they know what the problem is (inductivity) but in wounding therapy they still don’t know what is preventing consistent success.
With regards to other cells researchers are finding ways to overcome the inductivity issue so perhaps some of those methods will be helpful for hair cells. We need to give this a little time. Dr. Nigam is coming back and hopefully they all discussed some potential ways to solve the inductivity problem and Dr. Nigam can start experimenting with these concepts right NOW.
this is indeed the problem. I mean of course they will solve the problem sooner or later but no one can really say when. At the current pace of things, it could take decades before the problem is solved. People here have great difficulty remaining objective and have a strong tendency to be overly optimistic out of pure desperation. Hair loss research has certainly not been moving very fast in the past and I have little hope that will suddenly change.
Realistically speaking, researchers have known about the inductivity problems over a decade now and have been “taking it seriously” (as jarjar put it), the problem is that they just do not know how to solve it. The problem here is not about “taking it seriously”, but about being consistently unable to find a solution.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
How do we know the cell inductivity/growth consistency problems can be beaten - EVER?[/quote]
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