The Primary Acell Questions, IMO

Stem cell; cell based hair therapy
1

I’ve followed Acell posts here with interest, but I haven’t studied Acell information like some of you have.

When Acell has been used in treating human wounds, did the hair grow back in, too? I’m talking about the vellus hair that covers the human body. Does anyone know?

In my opinion, the questions about Acell are (in order of importance)

  1. Will it close a wound without leaving a scar? If so, this will dramatically change – and improve - the methods and results of all cosmetic surgery.
  2. Will it regenerate hair follicles (vellus and scalp) in new skin?
  3. If it regenerates hair follicles in the scalp, will the follicles line up in the proper configuration? There is a pattern to the way hair follicles lay on the head. If the new follicles don’t follow that pattern, it will look odd when the hair is buzzed short. I’m not sure how the new skin would receive the information telling it to regrow follicles according to a certain configuration, but I also don’t know how the body does a lot of things it does.

If the answers to all three of these questions ends up being “yes”, everything changes for people suffering from hairloss.

If the answer to just #1 is “yes”, it will still improve things dramatically. Strip scars can be removed and the wound stitched closed, and the patient will be able to wear his hair very short (or shaved) because there will be no scar. Strip procedures will become more popular than they are now, because you can move a lot of hair inexpensively, and there will be no scarring (you will still be skewing the hair pattern though, so keep that in mind).

Is Acell the “cure” to hairloss? I seriously doubt it. Does it have the potential to be the best thing to happen to hair transplants since FUE? Absolutely. I am very curious to see how things go with Dr Jones’s patient, and I hope other doctors will follow his example. Dr Umar, Dr Cole, are you listening? :wink:

2

As to the third question about directional orientation,

I would suspect that the hair growth direction is no more challenging that regeneration correct fingerprints or regenerating an entire hair follicle in the first place.

The growth direction has been a trouble spot for a long time with attempts at true cloning. But I don’t think it’ll apply to methods like either Acell or Folica. True cloning would not draw its follicle-building instructions from any bodily information at the recipient site at all, whereas both Acell and Folica would.

I think it makes sense that new hairs would have the correct growth direction for the same reason that they might not have any better DHT resistance than the original follicles did in that area of scalp - the new follicles are really just built like the old ones in that spot in every way.

Just my opinion.