Hair loss news first:

— I have covered Samumed and its SM04554 product a few times on this blog in the recent past. The drug is likely not going to be a miracle hair loss cure.  I was therefore impressed that the company’s poker whiz CEO Osman Kibar still managed to recently get profiled on a Forbes magazine cover page.  In any case, a few days ago Samumed completed its Phase 2 clinical trials. Now we can only hope that they choose to continue with Phase 3 trials.

— Seems like South Korea’s Dong-A ST updated the Phase 1 clinical trials page for its DA-4001 topical finasteride product.

— If you live near Austin, Texas, Dermresearch has an ongoing hair loss drug related study in which you might be able to enroll.  Some confusion about the exact drug being tested per this HLT forum thread (see second page).

— Sweden based Follicum’s US patent was approved in July.  The patent covers the drug candidate FOL-005.

— HairCell, yet another new startup in the hair loss world.  This one wants to use a “bioelectric stimulator combined with a micro infusion pump”. Even if the vast majority of these new entrants end up as outright failures or even frauds, I have never seen such frenetic activity in the hair loss world as witnessed in the past several years.  HairCell’s phase 1 clinical trials have not yet commenced.

— Seems like this Italian man is creating his own version of Dr. Brotzu’s lotion/potion.  I would not want to emulate him, but his blog is an entertaining read when you translate it into English.

— HLT forum member “antydhtor” started an extremely interesting thread with a great title in March, and he updates it regularly.  I only noticed the thread in June.

— Joe Tillman has been making some great videos that he then posts on his youtube channel.  When you combine Joe with the highly respected and skilled surgeon Dr. Ron Shapiro, you get an excellent final result.

— Commentator Peter Renardo gives us some more updates on his decades old artery ligation procedure.  Extremely interesting, although I would never go through with such a procedure just to save hair.

— A more detailed article on Rivertown Therapeutics, a new company that I discussed in last month’s “brief items of interest” post.

— A 2015 presentation on Kerastem by Dr. David Perez-Meza (who is located in Spain) was posted on an Italian hair loss site last month. Results in 6 patients showed an improvement in all, with an average 14 percent increase in hair count at 6 months.  Not that great for the price people pay for this treatment unless results last for years I would think.

— Brief mention of Follica.

— El Chapo going bald, although the link between stress and permanent hair loss is tenuous at best in my opinion.

And now on to medical items of interest:

— Stem cell stimulating regenerative dental fillings could eliminate the need for root canals.

— Artificial pancreas next year?

— Extremely interesting article on “pausing” people so as to then bring them back from the dead.

— Growing human bones from fat cells.

— Finally, a biodegradable absorbable stent for heart patients with blocked arteries.

— 3-parent DNA containing life-forms seem healthy when it comes to monkeys.  Note that the UK has already approved this technology for human embryos.  Below: “Spindler and Spindy, two of the monkeys created from the DNA of three parents.”

— 3D printed jaw for cancer survivor.

— 3D bone graft printing getting closer.

— Recently, I read an article that referred to an interesting freely available online 3D Human Blastocyst Viewer.  You have to click on the bottom left options first and then on all the options on the right side.  Way above my head, but there are probably at least three blog commentators on here who will understand this.  Also reminds me of Dr. Michael Rendl’s Hair-GEL (gene expression library) site and Dr. Owen Rakham’s Mogrify,  both of which I have mentioned on this blog in the past.

— A transparent skull implant = “window into the brain”.

— Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly: Next 30 years in technology.

— Thanks to commentator “Susana” from Portugal (who is usually quite pessimistic) for providing us with this link on groundbreaking skin replacement technology from Spain.

Update: And in other important news, Dr, Tsuji published a new paper several days ago; and Pokemon Go was finally launched in Japan, its spiritual homeland.

Without any doubt, there has never been a better year than this one in the hair loss research world.  The last four months have been especially fruitful, and I am not even considering a number of newer entrants in the field (just because most seem suspicious or are likely to produce best case results that will be akin to those from Rogaine). Key noteworthy recent developments:

• First, in April, Follica (which had been left for dead by many due to its numerous conflicting signals since inception in 2006) surprised us and is clearly alive and aims to release its product in 2018 in a best case scenario.  The company’s majority owner PureTech stated in a summary document that “skin disruption alone was safe and generates new follicles as well as new hair“.

• Thereafter, in June, Aclaris Therapeutics’ CEO Mr. Neal Walker clearly stated at three difference investor presentation that “topical covalently bound highly selective JAK3 inhibitors” work in treating androgenetic alopecia and not just in treating alopecia areata.

• Also in June, Histogen made a surprising announcement that it would start treating patients in Mexico in 2018.  Like Follica, many people had left Histogen for dead due to the fact that the company has been involved in hair loss research for a similarly lengthy period of time with mixed signals in terms of efficacy, clinical trial and product release dates.

• Then, in July came perhaps the most exciting news ever in the hair loss cure research world.  RIKEN/Dr. Takashi Tsuji, Kyocera and Organ Technologies have formed a partnership that aims to commercially release a product in 2020 that will essentially represent a cure for hair loss.  2020 is clearly a best case scenario assuming no major hiccups along the way.  Mr. Tsuji is a world renowned and extremely well respected and modest scientist; RIKEN has access to Japanese government funds and to numerous leading scientists in the world of regenerative medicine; Kyocera is a private sector multinational behemoth with pre-existing hardware side technology and expertise that will likely be of much use to Dr. Tsuji.

RIKEN and Dr. Tsuji are conducting their research at the Kobe Biomedical Innovation Cluster (KBIC) in Japan in RIKEN’s Integrated Innovation Building.

Shiseido/Replicel Joins Kyocera/RIKEN/ Tsuji at the KBIC

Today, in yet one more major positive development this year, it was announced that the Shiseido/Replicel team has finally started its delayed 60-person (men and women included) Japanese clinical trials for its autologous cell therapy based RCH-01 product.  While the study will be conducted at two hospitals in Tokyo, the injected product(s) will be manufactured by Shiseido at their SPEC (Cell-Processing and Expansion Center) in KBIC.  I discussed this facility in a post in 2014. It is located in the below Business Support Center for Biomedical Research Activities (BMA) building in KBIC.

So Shiseido and RIKEN’s respective research and development work will be conducted at buildings within a mile of each other according to this map (both buildings are on the right side of the railroad).

While doing research on KBIC, I found that it is located on Port Island in the city of Kobe, and Port Island is an artificially constructed island. Would be quite something if humans end up creating new replacement hair follicles on a man-made island.

It has been a while since the last poll.  Today there are two of them, and both are related to hair transplants (which for the time being is usually the best option to treat extensive hair loss in both men and women). The first poll below can be answered/taken by both men and women. However, the second one is only applicable to men as far as I know.

Note: Voting buttons are below the photos. Only two options for each answer.

Poll 1

Poll 2

I discussed Liz Parrish and BioViva in October of last year.  While there has since been a great deal of skepticism surrounding Ms. Parrish’s self-experimentation as well as scientific credentials, I am still very interested in her approach (in particular, getting treated in developing countries so as to escape US regulations).  She could really help speed up scientific progress.  Moreover, anti-aging work (especially in regards to telomerase) has the potential to help hair loss sufferers too.

BioViva and Sierra Sciences

After some significant negative publicity earlier this year, Liz has received some positive feedback recently and she has visited a number of countries.

• First, she filed an important patent in April of this year.

• Shortly thereafter in May, the relatively well respected Dr. Bill Andrews (who I have covered on this blog before if you do a search) of Sierra Sciences announced that his company would partner with Liz’s company BioViva and open an anti-aging clinic in Fiji:

• Also in May, Bill and Liz co-presented at this year’s 10x Medical Device Conference:

Liz Parrish Visits Russia

• Most surprising of all, in June Liz went to Russia and received more publicity than she did in any other country this year.  I like this quote from the Russian visit summary page on BioViva’s site:

For the first time in history two of the fastest growing trends – Longevity and BlockChain – are coming together.

There are quite a few videos of Liz’s numerous presentations in Russia on youtube.  Here are some highlights:

• Liz and Avi Roy — Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

• The most popular one with almost 100k views:

• An interview on Russian TV:

• It really got out of hand in Russia and Liz became a glamour girl:

There is a chance that this company might end up being one of the craziest scams that the biotech world has ever witnessed, but it is nevertheless great to see the popularity of ant-aging treatments in Russia.  The country is the only one besides the US to have its own Cryonics facility.

Last year, someone sent me an interesting link to a study on LGR6 expressing epithelial stem cells (LGR6+ ESC) and their potential to regenerate human skin as well as hair in wounded skin.  LGR6 stands for “leucine-rich repeat-containing G-protein coupled receptor 6”, which is a protein that is encoded by the LGR6 gene in humans.

It turns out that one of the main authors of the above paper, Dr. Michael Neumeister, is also the chief of microsurgery and research at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (SIUSOM).  When I went to SIU’s plastic surgery website’s research section, I was surprised to see that they were undertaking significant research on hair regeneration.  You can click on the “current research projects” and “recent publications” tabs to read more on their hair related work.

One surprising thing is that under “current research projects”, they mention LGR5 rather than LGR6 as in the earlier mentioned study:

2. Human Hair Regeneration: A Cure for Male Pattern Baldness

Goal: To produce de novo human hair follicles from LGR5 stem cells for a potential long term treatment for male pattern baldness.

Besides LGR5 and LGR6, it seems like LGR4 is also involved in hair follicle growth.  LGR 4/5/6 are classified as a gene family.  The differing actions of LRG5 and LRG6 on hair follicles is outlined in a portion of this article.

Going back to the original study I mentioned at the top of this post, it is interesting to note that they also mention the positive effect of adding ADSc (adipose-derived stem cells) containing SVF (stromal vascular fraction) to the LGR6 seeded scaffolding.  I have covered SVF briefly on this blog before, and ADSc has been a hot topic on all hair loss forums as well as this blog for the past year or two.  The article also mentions upregulation of WNT signaling and of epidermal growth factor (EGF) after the transplantation of a “LGR6+ epithelial stem cell-enriched scaffold.”  For the scientists and experts among this blogs commentators, all of this might of significant interest for discussion.

Note: I have now added SIU to my list of the most important research centers around the world that are working on a cure for hair loss.

Several weeks ago, I got a haircut and really disliked seeing an increasingly visible small bald spot in my frontal scalp region when my hair was short. Therefore, for the first time in my life I decided to try out a hair loss concealer seriously, more for experimentation purposes rather than for any serious regular long-term usage goal. I initially had major reservations about my experiment. I feared that it would be a messy application process; perhaps rain and even wind would cause some of the powder/fibers to run onto my forehead; perhaps the color of the concealer would not exactly match my hair color; perhaps the dye would discolor my pillow; perhaps I would become addicted to the product. Nevertheless, I decided to proceed.

My Experiences With a Hair Loss Concealer

I chose to try out a product called Toppik, largely because it was one of three (the others being Dermmatch and Caboki) that I had heard of over and over for many years. For around five consecutive days after my haircut (every morning after a shower once my hair was totally dry), I sprinkled a small quantity of the product onto the small barren portion of my frontal scalp region. I was quite impressed at the ease of the process of applying Toppik. It was not messy whatsoever. More importantly, the results were excellent. Just a few shakes/sprinkles of Toppik were sufficient to totally cover my small bald region. Moreover, the product never came off during the course of the day (even in significant wind) unless I happened to sleep on a bed and rub my scalp against a pillow for a significant period of time. Even then, the pillow did not become dirty and some of the product just came off without discoloring anything it fell on. Showering definitely removed all the product from my hair completely, but thankfully without getting the bathtub dirty. All in all, I was quite impressed with Toppik and immediately decided to write this post covering the most reviewed hair loss concealer products on Amazon

The Most Popular Hair Loss Concealer Products in the World

While obviously far from being a cure for hair loss, for many people concealers will be a great solution to tackle their hair loss problem until an actual cure is realized. Although best results and greatest satisfaction will be attained by people with minimal totally bald patches on their scalps, there are many videos on youtube where concealers are even very helpful for people with extensive hair loss. Amazon.com reviews of virtually all concealers are generally favorable.  Women are also very pleased with concealer products. Below I list the most popular products out there based on number of Amazon reviews (if there are many versions/colors of a product that are sold separately on Amazon, I only consider the most reviewed one).  Keep in mind that there are many fake reviews on Amazon and you should pay most attention to the ones that come from verified users who have reviewed a diverse range or products for at least a few years. Virtually all concealer products are deemed to work well for people of all ethnicities as well as for both men and women, so I do not delve too much into those details below and you need to read customer reviews in detail to figure out what would work best for you.

Toppik Hair Building Keratin (Wool) Hair Fibers

This is the bestselling hair loss concealer product on Amazon with 1,929 reviews averaging 4.4/5 stars at the time of writing this post. As discussed earlier, I used this product and was very pleased with it. Be careful that you pick the correct color (nine choices) and size options before buying Toppik.  As you can tell from the Amazon reviews, a lot of women love this product too.  My own salt shaker type container of Toppik says that it is made in the US by a company called Spencer Forrest.  The main ingredients are keratin, sillica, ammonium chloride and DMDM Hydantoin (plus added artificial colors).  The keratin is sourced from wool according to the Toppik website’s FAQ section.  Each small bottle will last for a month or two depending on extent of daily use and extent of balding area.  Note that I did not use a Toppik FiberHold Spray that is recommended for concurrent use with the fibers for best results, and neither did I use the Toppik Spray Applicator that is supposed to help make the application process more precise.  Also note that while the company’s website states that rain will not remove the Toppik from your scalp, I have my doubts, and some reviewers suggest that this is not always true.  You probably want to avoid heavy rain when using Toppik or for that matter when using any concealer products.

XFusion Keratin (Wool) Fibers

This is a product that I had never heard about before I started writing this post.  Apparently, despite having its own website, XFusion is made by the same US-based company (Spencer Forrest) that makes Toppik and contains the same wool based keratin ingredient. On Amazon, the product currently has 670 reviews averaging 4.4/5 stars.  XFusion is significantly cheaper in comparison to Toppik for the same quantity of product.  It is available in nine different colors, although each option is sold on separate Amazon product pages. (Note that Spencer Forrest also produces a third line of hair concealer products called Couvre).

Caboki Natural (Gossypium Herbaceum Cotton) Hair Loss Concealer

I have seen Caboki ads all over the internet during the past several years.  On Amazon, the product has 544 reviews averaging 4.1/5 stars as of today.  The great thing about this product is that it seems to be totally natural per the list of ingredients: “Moroccan Gossypium Herbaceum and mineral-based colorants (natural iron oxide)”.  On the company’s website they are currently offering a free sample. The company is headquartered in the US.  Caboki is offered in seven different color choices.

Hair Illusion 100% Natural Human Hair Fibers

Hair Illusions’s very unique and interesting 100 percent natural human hair fiber product currently has 533 reviews averaging 3.9/5 stars.  The product has eight color options for both men and women. However, on the company’s website, they do not have much information on where the human hair is sourced from.  Hair Illusion is based in the US, but no actual address is shown on their website. The company’s CEO is pretty confident about his product.

Strand Maximizer Keratin Hair Fibers

Yet another keratin based product, although unlike the earlier wool-based ones, this one does not disclose the exact type of keratin used. Currently 527 reviews averaging 4.1/5 stars on Amazon.  Available in ten unique colors. The company is based in the US.

Infinity Micro-Fiber (Rayon) Based Hair Building Fibers

As of today, this product had 505 reviews averaging 3.9/5 stars on Amazon.  However, I could not find anything about location/address of company or product ingredients on the company’s website during the ten or so minutes that I tried. They do have a FAQ section and easily visible options on ways to contact them. On Amazon, the ingredients of Infinity are listed as “Rayon; may contain: CI 47000, CI 14700, CI 42102.”  The latter three are various artificial colors. Infinity comes in ten color options.

Art Naturals (Gossypium Herbaceum Cotton) Hair Fusion Fibers

A similar product to Caboki, with the main ingredient being a type of cotton named Gossypium Herbaceum.  On Amazon, Art Naturals Hair Fusion product currently has 325 reviews averaging 4.1/5 stars and is available in four different colors.  On the company’s website, the full list of ingredients is written as: “Gossypium Herbaceum fibre, castor oil hydrogenated, spice berry, ethanol, mineral based colorants (natural iron oxide).”  Art Naturals is headquartered in the US.

Cuvva Keratin Hair Fibers

While several of the earlier mentioned keratin fiber products were made from wool, US-based Cuvva does not disclose that information and just states the following on its site: “Cuvva hair fibers are made up of pure, organic keratin protein, just like all human hair. They are charged with a precise level of electrostatic energy in order to form the maximum magnetic attraction to your thinnest hair. There are no harmful chemicals or additives whatsoever.”  Available in four colors on Amazon, with 194 reviews averaging an excellent 4.5/5 stars at the moment.

DermMatch Natural Botanical & Mineral Based Hair Loss Concealer

Long-time hair loss forum visitors will be aware that DermMatch has been one of the 3-4 most popular products out there when it comes to hair loss concealers.  However, on Amazon, the product has surprisingly fewer reviews than would be expected: 108 reviews averaging 4.2/5 stars as of today.  The product is available in eight colors.  Each DermMatch disc container lasts for an average of eight months according to the company’s website.  Ingredients are all natural and include various emollients and botanicals.  The US-based company that makes this product has been in business since 1992. Note that this product is not a fiber, but more like a scalp makeup product.

Hair loss news first:

— Kyocera updated its article on the biggest news of this year in the hair loss world.  They plan to conduct clinical research in Japanese fiscal year 2019 (i.e., between April 1st 2018 – March 31st 2019) and put the technology into “practical use” in 2020.  Interesting quote:

“While various methods are under evaluation, Kyocera’s piezoelectric technology is of particular interest as a means of discharging small amounts of viscid cells in a precise manner during the cell processing process.”

— PGD2 inhibitor Fevipiprant could be a miracle treatment for asthma.  I am still hopeful that Setipiprant will be better than expected when it comes to treating hair loss.  Worth listening to Kythera CEO’s interview here if you haven’t already.

— More evidence that enhancing the β-catenin signalling pathway in dermal papilla cells allows faster and denser hair growth.

— New findings from a Stanford University (US) and A*STAR (Singapore)’s Institute of Medical Biology collaboration:  Wnt signalling plays a critical role in hair follicle stem cell maintenance. Interesting quote:

“Compounds, particularly those which have already been established to be Wnt activators, can now be tested against cultured HFSCs to see if they do stimulate hair regrowth. The scientific community may also be able to culture HFSCs more efficiently by tweaking Wnt signalling to the optimal levels.”

— New interview with Replicel CEO Lee Buckler.  Important part is around three minutes in.

— New article that covers Dr. Christiano’s company Rapunzel as well as other relevant subjects including Samumed, Vixen/Aclaris and Dr. Joseph Greco.

— Hairlosstalk is interviewing Dr. Gail Naughton of Histogen this week.  Unfortunately the questions are already finalized, but its still worth a gander through this thread.

— New study from China: “Hair follicle and sebaceous gland “de novo” regeneration with cultured epidermal stem cells and skin-derived precursors.”

— Cellmid to enter US hair loss treatment market.

— Dr. Cole’s office sent me an update on PRP and ACell recently.  I think they sent out a mass e-mail on the subject since its contents were also pasted in here.

— Joe Tillman discusses his Dr. Cooley PRP treatment results.

— Healeon Medical is starting a new clinical trial in Honduras that will “evaluate the safety and efficacy of the use of a biocellular mixture of emulsified adipose-derived tissue stromal vascular fraction (AD-tSVF) and high density platelet-rich plasma concentrate (HD- PRP) as compared with adipose-derived cell-enriched SVF (AD-cSVF) + AD-tSVF and HD- PRP concentrates in treatment of androgenetic alopecia (AGA) and Female Pattern Hair Loss (FPHL).”

— Dr. Jeffrey Epstein is conducting the “first ever FDA-approved study in the US on the use of fat-derived stems cell for the treatment of hair loss in men and women.”  If you are near Miami, perhaps worth a visit.

My note: All of the last four points cover treatments that are highly controversial and far from guaranteed to work.  Buyer beware.

On a less serious train of thought:

— Eat curry to prevent hair loss.

— He says that black guys do not always pull off the bald look.  I still think he pulls it off.

— When Homer Simpson got hair due to a miracle drug call dimoxinil.

— Our lack of body and scalp hair may have allowed our species to thrive.

And now on to medical items of interest:

— Last year I discussed the inspirational Zion Harvey after he got a double hand transplant.  He had lost both his legs, both his hands and his kidney to a childhood infection.  One year after his double hand transplant surgery, here is the result:

— Chinese scientists to pioneer first human CRISPR trial.

— “Bio is the new digital.”  Great article from Taiwan that is a must read after translation.  Boston is to biotech what Silicon Valley is to information technology.  In the hair loss world, it seems like New York and San Diego (see here) are far more important than Boston, but perhaps we will see some surprises from Boston soon?!

— Two stories on aging in the Economist in the past week.  Here and here.

— Dr. David Sinclair’s presentation on ageing and lifespan extension.

— At least androgens have some benefits such as telomere length extension.

— Dr. George Church on the future of genetic engineering.

— Genetic engineering will change everything.  Very optimistic video:

— Gene therapy cure with a money-back guarantee.

— Using a patient’s own stem cells and a 3D printer, scientists have genetically engineered a “living hip” that will cease pain.

— Cornea cells successfully grown and implanted to cure blindness in animals.

— Peter Thiel is a fan of parabiosis.

— Update on Dr. Frankenstein.  Full body transplant scheduled for December 2017.

— Scientists just created nanorobots to travel the bloodstream and fight cancerous tumors.

In 2013, I wrote two posts (see here and here) on body hair transplants (BHT) where surgeons move body hair to the scalp in the event of donor hair shortage at the back of the scalp in the permanent zone of severely balding people.  This type of procedure has some drawbacks as I discussed before, and body hair is virtually never as good or reliable as scalp donor hair. Nevertheless, there have by now been thousands of BHT cases performed worldwide with many satisfied patients.  In most cases, body hair is added as an adjunct filler to scalp hair during a hair transplant procedure, although I have also seen videos of excellent body hair only megasession hair transplant procedures.  The increasing popularity of BHT makes sense when one considers that a large portion of balding men tend to have a lot of body hair.

Below is a list of surgeons who offer body hair transplants around the world.  I only included those that have devoted pages of their websites specifically to BHT or have presented interesting BHT case examples on their sites and/or hair loss forums.  From my years of reading hair loss forums, I would guess that Dr. Arvind Poswal (India), Dr. John Cole (US) and Dr. Ray Woods (Australia) are probably the most experienced surgeons in the world at performing body hair to head hair transplants, although I could be off and you should conduct your own research.  Virtually all surgeons seem to find beard hair as the best type of body hair to be used for moving to the scalp, although some prefer not touching facial hair due to fear of potential permanent scarring.  Most surgeons seem to find chest hair to be the second best candidate to move to the scalp.

Note that for many people hair transplants represent a “cure” for hair loss so posts such as this are important.  Moreover, if you browse all the links below, there are some fascinating before and after transformation photos and chest/beard/other body area post extraction healing photos that are worth checking out.

Australia

• Dr. Rhett Bosnich.
• Dr Mario Marzola (scroll down to the body hair transplant section).
• Dr. Ray Woods.  His most famous BHT patient: “Timetested“, who started his transformation as far back as 2001.  Also see a summary of Dr. Woods presented online cases on hairsite.  Dr. Woods is one of the pioneers of BHT.

Belgium

• Dr. Christian Bisanga.  Highly respected FUE surgeon.  I prefer his “BHFUE” term to the now widely used “BHT” term.
• Dr. Bijan Feriduni.
• Dr. Patrick Mwamba (his website seems to be down).

Canada

• Dr. Robert Jones.

Cyprus

• HDC Hair Clinic.

Georgia

• Talizi Clinic (Dr. Akaki Tsilosani and Dr. Vazha Vadachkoria). Seems like they both also work in Ireland.

Germany

• Dr. Reza Azar.

India

• Dr. Tejinder Bhatti (has interesting statistics on his BHT patients).
• Dr. Kapil Dua.
• Dr. Vikas Gawri.  Also has this second site.
• Dr. Niraj Goenka.
• Dr. Kinnar Kapadia.
• Dr. Feroz Khan.
• Dr. Madhukumar.
• Dr. Bishan Mahadevia.
• Dr. Venkataram Mysore.  An interesting one patient report that he published can be found here.
• Dr. Arvind Poswal.  In all likelihood, the world’s most experienced surgeon when it comes to BHT based on that excellent data collection effort on hairsite.  Dr. Poswal published an important study in 2010 that discusses how preshaving the region of the body from where body hair is extracted four days prior to hair transplantation will ensure that only anagen growth phase body hair is extracted and then transplanted.
• Dr. Pradeep Sohi.

Netherlands

• Dr. Coen Gho (scroll down the page to get to the BHT section).

Pakistan

• Dr. Muhammad Rashid.

Poland

• Dr. Jerzy Kolasinski.

Spain

• Dr. Jose Lorenzo.
• Instituto Medico Laser (various surgeons).

Turkey

• Dr. Ali Karedeniz.
• Dr. Hakan Doganay.
• Dr. Ozgur Oztan.

United Kingdom

• The Private Clinic (Dr. Raghu Reddy and others — brief mention on that page when you scroll down).
• Dr. Malte Villnow (scroll down to the end).

United States of America

• Dr. Bernardino Arocha.
• Dr. John Cole (perhaps the most experienced surgeon in the US when it comes to BHT and even FUE in general).
• Marc Dauer.
• Dr. Jeffrey Epstein.
• Dr. Baubac Hayatdavoudi.
• Dr. Gregory Pistone.
• Dr. Robert True (seems to have been one of the earliest adopters).
• Dr. Gregory Turowski.  See this patient example of his on the BTT forums.  He also seems to have a second site.
• Dr. Sanusi Umar.  He has some of the best videos on youtube when it comes to BHT megasessions.  However, his site has not been loading for me today.

Clinics Present in More than one Country

• Vinci Hair Clinic.

US (Atlanta, Georgia) based Dr. John Cole is undoubtedly one of the world’s most respected hair transplant surgeons.  He has trained numerous other surgeons around the world over the years, and is almost certainly among the world’s five most experienced surgeons when it comes to the now dominant follicular unit extraction (FUE) method of hair transplantation.  In 2013, Dr. Cole received the prestigious ISHRS Golden Follicle award.  More importantly, over the years Dr. Cole has been at the forefront of testing out new procedures and techniques, and at adding his own cutting edge modifications to existing procedures. Some might consider a lot of these modifications to just be marketing gimmicks, but I think it is genuine interest on the part of Dr. Cole to improve the overall field of hair restoration.

In recent months, Dr. Cole has taken an active interest in improving the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) procedure.  I discussed this in several posts in the past year (i.e., search for “Dr. Cole” in here and here). PRP for hair restoration has taken off like wildfire in the past few years, but results have been extremely inconsistent.   Moreover, almost all hair transplant surgeons who offer PRP (often supplemented with ACell) treatments agree that patients will not regrow hair on totally bald areas of their scalps.  Nevertheless, many claim that PRP usually makes existing hair thicker and even regrows recently shrunken hair.  I am skeptical of the latter, but definitely not totally dismissive.  Over the years I have a read a few positive testimonials about PRP on hair loss forums from respectable long-term members, but none of these testimonials have suggested any miracle results.

Dr. Cole’s new PRP Study

This week Dr. Cole sent me an interesting e-mail about his thoughts on PRP and about his new study on PRP and I have pasted the contents of his e-mail below.   Note that I had not e-mailed him to ask anything about PRP, so this e-mail was Dr. Cole’s own initiative.  I have added some brief notes in red below and bolded some of the important parts of Dr. Cole’s e-mail.  I am curious to see what blog readers think.  As always, please try to stick to intelligent blog post related comments (unrelated comments about interesting new developments in the hair loss world are ok) and no insults:

“

Here is the current PRP study I am proposing. We have seen a 50% increase in hair density at six months with Angel PRP (see here) and a decrease with Regen PRP (see here) at that point, but there is an improvement in density and hair check at 12 months with both. That’s good. An increase in hair density is not enough. We need an increase in hair mass and hair check shows we can get this. It just proves that not all PRP is equal. Some are terrible. What we found with Regen PRP was that some growth factor concentrations were quite low. It suggests that some PRP kits produce better quality platelets because overall levels of platelets were similar. By the way, 1X levels of platelets just don’t work (I have read that 5X is the desired number). Don’t waste your time, nor you money on those. What we have not documented to date is a benefit from Acell (FYI — there are other extracellular matrix products out there too besides ACell), but our data is incomplete at this point, so I’m holding back on any conclusions on Acell. What I think Acell does with PRP is prolong the duration of growth factors by allowing a sustained release. The problem with Acell is that it is of porcine origin, which makes it intolerant to some religious affiliations. Thus we need to evaluate the benefits of microparticles such as dalteparin and protamine on the advantages of a sustained release of growth factors at some point soon. These much less expensive adjuncts to PRP would remove religious barriers, as well as, remove financial burden to patients. We know that Acell can help with follicle regeneration since we cannot locate up to 48% of FUE extraction sites (he is talking about hair transplant extraction here) when we apply it, but whether Acell stimulates stem cells in follicles in conjunction with PRP remains a mystery that we will solve soon. For now, we have to focus on higher growth factor concentrations obtained by sonicated PRP.

Accordingly, now we want to focus on sonicated PRP. At 3 1/2 months, I have found 64 out of 80 grafts growing. That’s amazing with sonicated PRP. The growth factor concentrations in sonicated PRP are off the chart high. As a result, we are engaging in a study in collaboration with the department of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan to investigate the effect of high concentrations of growth factors on the dermal papilla this year. We also want to look at the density of hair and the hair check and the diameter in a comparison of standard PRP with Acell and sonicated PRP with Acell.

I want to emphasize that across the board all patients in our study done in conjunction with Chiara Insalaco, a plastic surgeon from Rome, had an initial decrease in hair density and hair mass (Hair Check). This reduction in density and hair mass mimics the effect we see from Minoxidil. I speculate that all patients undergo a transformation from the telogen (resting) phase to the anagen (growing phase) with high quality, concentrated PRP. Anagen effluvium leads to an initial period of shedding, which means that patients get worse before they get better. Just as an adult tooth pushes the baby tooth out of the way, the anagen hair pushes the telogen hair out of the way. We noted this right away with hair clippings. We found that the percentage of shorter hairs was much higher following treatment with PRP, and the proportion of longer hairs was much lower following PRP. Over time both density and length increase, which leads to an increase in hair mass closer to 12 months following treatment with PRP. Dr. Insalaco and I counted every hair that we clipped in the study area and grouped them by length. Following PRP, the number of longer hairs drops. However, it recovers and exceeds the number of pre-treatment long hairs following the injection of PRP. Based on these findings, I would recommend a high-quality PRP every 6 to 12 months as a maintenance treatment; however, the duration of this benefit remains unknown.

What PRP will not do is to improve the quality of miniaturized hair for the most part based on our global photography. Years ago in 1999, I found that the last thing lost as follicular unit density, while the first thing lost was hair density in androgenic alopecia (confusing sentence). The prompted me to recommend the use of retardants to hair loss early on before the loss of follicles. My conclusions were antecedent to those later proposed by pharmaceutical companies and other researchers. There are no means to bring follicles back once lost (I am not so sure.  Please read this Dr. Cole), and PRP fails in this objective too. However, unlike products that retard the formation of DHT, PRP carries no unpleasant side effects such as a persistent loss of libido and depression (I do not buy the theory that DHT inhibitors causes depression — maybe depression due to other side effects). As such, PRP seems to be highly preferable to the use of chemicals that can cause long-standing physiological consequences.

We are fortunate to have an article publishing this fall with Pietro Gentile, also from Rome, Italy, documenting the benefits of PRP. We are lucky to have the opportunity to study the combination of PRP and adipose enriched stem cells on hair loss with Dr. Gentile. We are also affiliated with Paul Rose and Bernie Nussbaum in a similar study in Miami. However, the capacity to study adipose enriched stem cells is far greater in Italy than in the USA (Dr. Joseph Greco’s work and collaborations seem to also support this theory when it comes to PRP). With this in mind, Dr. Insalaco and I are forming an office in collaboration in Rome, Italy with the intent to further study the benefits of regenerative medicine on hair loss. Dr. Insalaco spent the past year training with me in my offices in Los Angeles and Atlanta. She plans to open both a hospital and private practice research center focused on the treatment of hair loss in Rome, Italy. I will be assisting her in this enterprise because she is a gifted surgeon and meticulous researcher. I look forward to continued collaboration with her.

I was thrilled to speak at the 7th conference on regenerative medicine in Rome last December and look forward to speaking at the 8th conference on regenerative medicine in Rome next December. The future of PRP seems to be a combination with adipose enriched stem cells, and there is not a better place to study this than in Italy at the moment (There are also many ongoing studies on ADSC in the US.  I mentioned two in here towards the end of the hair loss section).

So here is the study as follows:

The current study model is to apply Angel Arthrex PRP at a 2 or 3% hematocrit on one side and to activate this with Calcium Gluconate on one-half of the scalp. We have found that calcium gluconate activation offers no statistical difference from PRP activated by bovine thrombin, and it is quite safe. Bovine thrombin carries the risk of a hypersensitivity reaction or antibody response to the foreign thrombin. There are no documented cases of plasmid transmission from Bovine thrombin, but this is a concern some have. Plasmids seem to come only from the bovine neural tissue. Calcium gluconate, on the other hand, is quite safe. On the other side of the scalp, we are applying sonicated PRP. We know that sonicated PRP helps promote far faster hair growth from transplants than standard PRP. However, we are no sure if sonicated PRP will produce a better response in areas of hair loss. An evaluation of density and hair mass are the purpose of the study.

Sonicated PRP is PRP prepared by exposing your own PRP to a higher energy sound wave intended to lyse the platelets and release a much higher concentration of growth factors than can be obtained through activation with calcium gluconate. Some growth factors are increased by 5 to 8 times the concentration of growth factors activated by calcium gluconate. Sonicated PRP is also very safe. Sonicated PRP requires the use of an expensive machine designed to deliver a known energy for a variable duration of time. We have found that sonication for 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for a total of one hour produces the highest concentration of growth factors.

The typical cost for PRP is $5000.00 for three treatments. In the study, you will receive three treatments for $750.00 each.

In this study, we will not perform a trichoscan. A trichoscan requires us to trim to 1mm approximately 2 cm2 surface area of hair. Trimming just over 2 square cm can be difficult for individuals to conceal. Therefore, we will be looking at density, diameter, and the hair check because this requires a much small surface area of hair trimming and should not be noticeable. While we did see a positive response on the trichoscan in our previous study, we are eliminating this from the present study. The hair check will require your hair be at least 2 inches long for present and future follow-ups.

In the study, we will want to see you at 3, 6, and 12 months following treatments. We recommend the following treatment protocol. However, we would accept a single treatment provided you make your follow up appointments. We recommend the first treatment at day one, the second treatment at day 90, the third treatment at day 180. However, a single treatment is also possible.

We also know that almost all women respond to PRP. Furthermore, we have a new exciting product for men and females that is a Wnt up regulator (I am skeptical that an individual doctor can develop this when companies can not/are not, but glad Dr. Cole is trying out new things). The Wnt pathway has been shown to increase hair growth. In a study performed by Antonella Tosti, she found this product improved the Hair Check in the female population of patients she studied. She did not examine this product in men in her study. A positive response in the hair check is a more significant response than an increase in density because an improvement in hair mass ensures better coverage.

I can send you some specific one-year data on both Regen and Arthrex if you like (I do not plan to ask for this).

Regards,

Dr. Cole

“

Please read the post till the end to follow the rules.  I am not selling the below product, nor getting any fee to write this post.

FYI — in case you win, you will have to verify that you are the same person by posting another comment next week via the same computer/IP address (I can see those each time you comment) and same name.   Any suspicious entries/repeat entries from new first time commentators will be ignored.  For first-time commentators, please put in your exact correct e-mail address instead of a fake one when prompted before making a comment.  I will be emailing you if you win.

iRestore New Hair for the New Year Giveaway

Several days ago, someone from a public relations company contacted me and asked me if I was willing to give away a free iRestore laser hair growth system to one of my readers via a random drawing.  This is part of a promotion called “New Hair for the New Year” with the logic being that the laser will take 12 weeks to work, just in time for the coming new year.  I accepted the offer, since these laser devices are quite expensive and not guaranteed to work on everyone.  Do note that there is some evidence (e.g., see here and here) that low level laser/light therapy (LLLT) does benefit hair growth.  Lasers are unlikely to ever stimulate hair growth in areas that are totally bald, but there is a chance that lasers will make your existing hair stronger.  In fact I have noticed that that my own hair feels stronger and denser when I have been outdoors in the sun for half the day, although there is perhaps no strong connection between sunlight versus focused proximal laser light.

The iRestore laser device is FDA cleared for sale in the US.  Below is a photo of the device:

Prize Drawing Rules and Notes

• This sweepstakes/prize drawing is for US residents only (although if you are a nonresident who has a reliable physical US address, you can still participate).
• All you have to do is post a comment to this post and state that “I want to enter the prize drawing” or something similar such as “I am in”.  Note that if you have never made a comment on this blog before, I will need to approve your first comment and it will be on hold for a bit or might go to the spam folder. Also note that if you are posting a comment, you do not need to fill out the URL box (just leave it blank please) when prompted. When you fill out the name and e-mail boxes when writing a comment, you can enter a fake name, but please enter a valid e-mail address.  If you do win the prize, I will announce it on this blog and e-mail you, and then you will need to e-mail me your real name and real physical address.  I will not share your information with anyone other than the company that sends out the free iRestore laser device.
• The drawing is supposed to be random, so what I will do is that once I have all the entries (most likely I will wait for anywhere from 5-10 days before closing), is pick one name at random. However, if the name I pick is someone who has made too many foolish comments on this blog in the past (i.e., one of just 5 or so people that I recall in three years of writing this blog), I will redraw to find a more suitable winner.
• If commenting for the first time, I also highly recommending sticking to the same username once you pick one.  And try not to pick something like “Mike” “Matt” “Joe” etc… that has already been taken before and causes too much confusion.  At least add a number to the end of a name if its a very common name like the ones that I just listed.
• Finally, I am trusting that this company that has contacted me will make sure that the device gets to the winner on time.  They have assured me that it will get there within several days of my notifying them of the winner, so hopefully the lucky man or woman will get it in two weeks from today at the very latest.

Congratulations to “Shark” the winner of the contest. There were two people left after disqualifications of three, and in another random number generation selection, “Shark” beat out “Blaine1.” Hopefully the laser helmet will be mailed out asap.  I tried to the get the company to send out a second helmet to “Blaine1”, but they did not bite:-(

This is a far lengthier post than I expected to initially write. However, this post will serve as a template for how I run future prize drawings and hopefully my below strategy is not full of logical fallacies (excluding ones that save me time).

I decided to close the prize drawing in the last post after 5 days since there were far more entries than I was expecting considering that the contest was only limited to US (and Canadian later) entrants.

Due to the huge number of first time commentator entrants, I have had to change my strategy on how to select the winner (I will randomly select 5, then remove the suspicious ones or those who do not respond from the 5, and then randomly reselect the 1 final winner).  It is possible that a few first time entrants signed up more than once with different IPs and email addresses (even two regular long-time commentators signed on for the prize draw twice with two separate comments).  Some of the entrants probably live outside the US or Canada and have no US address so will be removed if in the list of 5.  So what I have done is use a random number generator website’s integer generation option to select 5 potential winners and I put in the range 1-182 in there since there were 182 comments in the last post when I closed the contest (I know that at least 20 of those comments were unrelated to the subject matter, but this is the best way I can run such contests without spending too much of my time weeding out unrelated comments).  Results of the random generation pasted below:

Random Integer Set Generator

You requested 1 set with 5 unique random integers, taken from the [1,182] range. The integers were sorted in ascending order.

Here is your set:

• Set 1: 12, 21, 45, 61, 178

Timestamp: 2016-09-06 06:51:21 UTC

So now I go to comments number 12, 21, 45, 61 and 178 in the last post:

12 = Farsi “I am in” = Update: Disqualified since IP addresses of past comments all in France and he did not post a comment here or e-mail me with a US address for the two days that I waited.

21 = Frank Plumbo “I to am in!” = Update: Disqualified since no comment here or e-mail to me for two days.

45 = Blaine1 = “count me in”

61 = Shark = “I am in”

178 = mjones = Disqualified for too many (six) unrelated comments in that last prize drawing thread.  Plus he did not even sign on for the prize drawing!  Will ban him in future so as to get a proper list of 5.

Please note that the order you see the comments in the last thread could be slightly different from the way I see them since I am logged in as “admin”, but hopefully not.  If I made a mistake in the counting of comments 12, 21, 45, 61 and 178 above, I apologize, but I will stick with the above potential winners’ names.  For all future prize drawings, I will not redo any procedure in case I make a counting error.

So the winner will be one of these four:

• Farsi
• Frank Plumbo
• Blaine1
• Shark

All four of you guys please post at least one comment in this thread using the same email you used last time and the same IP address/ computer/location that you used last time to post your comment. Also email me your full name and physical address from the same email address that you used for commenting.  I will wait for two days for responses.

Then I will browse through this blog’s comment history and search for your IP address.  If I find anything suspicious or undesirable (repeat entries, too many past usernames under same IP, too many entries from similar IPs in some small town or some small country, too many insults etc…), I will remove you from the list.  If more than one person is still left after I remove the suspicious entries, I will do another random generation and select the final winner and post his/her name at the top of this thread.

During the past few months, there have been a few new companies entering the hair regeneration sector, but none have impressed me and I have limited my coverage of all those companies to small sections within my once a month “brief items or interest” posts. Today, I learnt about yet another new entrant into the field named HairClone that I felt finally warranted its own post.  However, I still have some serious doubts about this company (would be shocked if they come out with anything in the next 5 years) and do not consider them anywhere near as important to us as the established entities such as the RIKEN/Kyocera/Tsuji partnership (Japan) or the Shiseido/ Replicel partnership (Japan).  First, before I continue, I have to give credit to the FollicleThought blog for covering this news first and also to the blog readers who e-mailed me about it or wrote a comment about it in the last post.  I will briefly analyze this new company via positives and negatives.

Positives

• The renowned and widely respected researcher Dr. Claire Higgins joined HairClone’s advisory board on August 30th (but alse read my comment on her in the “Negatives” section below).
  

  Very excited to welcome Claire Higgins onto our SAB! Claire’s work on dermal papilla cells will be of great help pic.twitter.com/B7ZKhbbHkv

  — HairClone (@HairClone) August 30, 2016

• HairClone will be hiring more scientific advisers besides Dr. Claire Higgins in the near future.  Would be great if they tried to get Dr. Roland Lauster into the team.

• A recent Tweet suggests monthly update meetings with PhD students:
  

  Great first monthly update meeting with Manchester University Doctoral Training Centre in Regen Med. students. Very good questions.

  — HairClone (@HairClone) August 17, 2016

• HairClone has devised a very unique and creative way to get funding (not necessarily a positive in many people’s minds) and that includes: crowdfunding; giving people who fund the company’s research preference when the actual treatment comes out; allowing investment in equity; offering leading hair transplant clinics around the world membership opportunities; and most interesting of all, hair follicle banking and storage.  On a somewhat related note, if you are having a baby, consider cord blood storage if you have the financial wherewithal.

Negatives

• By far the biggest negative is that this is still way too early in the game and who knows when trials will commence, and whether the company will succeed with its dermal papilla focused cloning technology in the first place.  Or even if they manage to get sufficient funding.

• Related to the above, when Solomon interviewed Dr. Claire Higgins earlier this year, she generally sounded pessimistic about new treatments and said the following about cloning (Update: Solomon corrected me in the comments and said she was only talking about cell injections here….but I think in general she sounded pessimistic about the hair cloning time frame in the whole interview):

“I think the future (but it’s not in 4 years or 5 years away, it’s like in 20 years) is to promote direct conversion of fibroblasts into papillae. But something like this will take decades. We don’t know how to do that yet.”

I am hoping that Dr Higgins will change her prediction to 10 years if her lab (only two years old at the time of the interview) and research work gets significantly more resources as a result of HairClone. Thankfully she said that she was not exactly sure about Dr. Tsuji’s work and neither did she list Shiseido’s trials in Japan in her list of ongoing trial examples, so maybe she is just entirely focused on her own work and not following others too much.  20 years would be too big a gamble to invest in a company such as HairClone, and I hope Dr. Bessam Farjo has other ideas and is hoping for much faster completion of clinical trials.  And of course he is probably not just relying on Dr. Higgins’ dermal papilla related work.

• The company website has some typos, flow issues and seems somewhat haphazardly put together at the moment.  e.g., this page that should probably be removed and this page’s URL includes “hello-world” like in an intro to computer science programming assignment etc…

Update:  I e-mailed Dr. Omar Aljitawi to ask him two questions (thanks to commentator “Jayjayaustria” for the first one) about this posts’s subject matter.  Then I sent him a second e-mail for further clarification.  Below are Dr. Aljitawi’s responses:

E-mail 1:

Admin: Since most people in the world have not saved their umbilical cord at birth, how would they benefit from this technology? Would you extract their stem cells from the Wharton’s jelly found in the eyeball region?

Dr. Aljitawi: I have not looked into other mesenchymal stem cell sources. For those who do not have their own umbilical cord MSCs saved, it might be possible to use third party MSCs.

Admin: Is there any reason that this technology has not proceeded any further insofar as getting to clinical trials? Are you actively looking for funding?

Dr. Aljitawi: Funding is certainly one obstacle. Finding expertise in the area to collaborate with is another obstacle. I am working on these obstacles now and I am very optimistic that we can move things forward faster, hopefully soon.

E-mail 2:

Admin: If you do use third party MSCs, is there a chance of rejection? Is it similar to using someone else’s organ during an organ transplant and than taking organ rejection medications for life?

Dr. Aljitawi: It remains a concern. However, the hair follicle is immune privileged, so that might not be an issue.

Umbilical Cord Wharton’s Jelly Superior to Umbilical Cord Blood

In my last post I mentioned the potential importance of storing cord blood (which is a sample of blood taken from a newborn baby’s umbilical cord).  In a surprising coincidence, today I read a highly interesting new study summary pertaining to umbilical cord derived Wharton’s jelly mesenchymal stem cells (WJMSCs) and hair follicle regeneration.

Wharton’s jelly is a gelatinous substance within the umbilical cord (as well as in the eyeball region).  Typically, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are derived from 1) Wharton’s jelly of the umbilical cord or from 2) umbilical cord blood.  However, there is a much higher concentration of MSCs in Wharton’s jelly in comparison to cord blood

Ectodermal Differentiation of WJMSCs and Hair Follicle Generation

In this latest study, the authors show the mechanisms underlying ectodermal differentiation of WJMSCs.  It should be noted that in 2013, two of the co-authors (Aljitawi OS and Hopkins RA) of this latest 2016 study first showed that they could generate cytokeratin 19-positive cells and hair-like structures from WJMSCs in vitro.  They summarized their results from 2013 as follows:

In one method, WJMSCs were seeded on a matrix isolated from Wharton’s jelly following decellularization. In the other method, WJMSCs were cultured to form spheroids. Our findings demonstrate that WJMSCs may have the capacity for ectodermal differentiation.

I have discussed 3D culturing and 3D spheroids many times on this blog in the past, and that subject is of foremost importance when it comes to hair cloning.  For the scientists among this blog’s readership, the patent for this technology has some detailed information on the spheroid technology being used (especially in sections 0065 through 0067).

Two of the latest 2016 study’s authors (Jadalannagari S and Aljitawi OS) also authored yet another paper in 2015 outlining the potential application of WJMSCs for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications.

Finally, in this latest 2016 study the authors also note that “up-regulation of β-catenin and noggin, along with the expression of TGF-β and SMAD and inhibition of BMP4 could be the mechanism behind this ectodermal differentiation and hair-like structure formation.”

University of Kansas Innovation and Collaboration (KUIC) Patent and Licensing Options?

The main author of the above studies is Dr. Omar Aljitawi who is currently a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. According to his bio “Dr. Aljitawi also has been studying Wharton’s jelly matrix as a scaffolding material for tissue regenerative applications like bone and cartilage regeneration.”  However, of much more importance is the fact that when it comes to hair regeneration, this technology might be for licensing or sale?!  I say this because of this page on the University of Kansas Innovation and Collaboration (KUIC)’s website.   Most relevant sentences/quotes on that page:

“

Application: Restore hair and treat baldness.

Benefits: The method can be used for restoring hair, which can potentially solve the problem of baldness.

Why it is Better: Current technology simply isolates cells from pre-existing hair shafts. This new method derives mesenchymal
stem cells from Wharton’s jelly matrix and stimulates them to produce hair follicle cells and hair structure. Hair
can be restored and baldness can be treated.

“

The inventors of this technology are listed as the earlier mentioned Dr. Omar Aljitawi along with a Dr. Lynda Bonewald (who seems mostly interested in bones and not hair).  The actual patent titled “Generating ck19-positive cells with hair-like structures from Wharton’s jelly” does not have Ms. Bonewald’s name on it.

The “licensing associate” for this technology is Dr. Aswini Betha.  I am curious why companies are not approaching him or the University of Kansas to acquire this technology considering that the patent was filed in 2013 and approved in 2014?  Perhaps Mr. Neal Walker would be interested?

The University of Kansas has now been added to the list of important hair loss cure research centers around the world.

Edit: There is also another 2014 study from India that suggests that human Wharton’s jelly mesenchymal stem cells promote scar-free skin wound healing with hair growth.

Few days later than usual, but lots of new developments in the past month.

Hair loss news first:

— The most important news is courtesy of HLT, which several days ago interviewed people from the Dr. Tsuji/RIKEN/Organ Technologies team (but not Dr. Tsuji himself). Interview publication has been delayed due to Japan’s “Respect for the Aged Day“, but according to the HLT admin, he has been given permission to divulge the following regarding the Tsuji team’s work:

“Human trials to begin 2018. Commercial availability still on track for 2020.”

While not surprising since this is an affirmation of what was said in July of this year, it will hopefully put many people’s minds at ease…at least till early next year:-)

— Thanks to who else but JAK superfan “nasa_rs” for letting us know that Aclaris Therapeutics updated its pipeline page and finally added its topical JAK inhibitor product (ATI-500003) for men with androgenetic alopecia (AGA).  Interestingly, all four of its JAK products are now shown to be 80 percent or so through the pre-clinical phase and are on the verge of entering Phase 1 trials. According to the pdf from the company’s September 14th webcast (see page 26), proof-of-concept (POC = Phase 1 and Phase IIA) trials for the company’s alopecia areata (AA) drugs will commence in the first and second quarter of 2017.  Considering that JAK inhibitors Ruxolitinib and Tofacitinib have already been FDA approved and in use for around 5-6 years, the big question is whether this will allow faster progression of Phase 1 clinical trials for Aclaris’ various JAK products?  According to wikipedia, there are currently seven other JAK inhibitors in clinical trials.

— Long-time perpetual disappointment Follica, which had earlier announced initiation of a registration study in the second half of 2016 has delayed plans till the first half of 2017 (thanks as always to “Mike G”, who sent me that link and has e-mailed me news about Follica many times in the past).  A recently announced best-case product release scenario of 2018 by Follica now sounds just as unlikely as hyper-prolific commentator “mjones” ever meeting with his hero and Follica founder Dr. George Cotsarelis:-(

— In my June “brief items of interest” blog post, I mentioned that Allergan had commenced phase 2A clinical trials for Setipiprant to treat androgenetic alopecia.  The company updated its clinical trial page again in August and many of their centers in the US are currently recruiting volunteers.  It seems like they will even pay you up to $650 for participating.

— Allergan also updated its Bimatoprost clinical trial page in August.  Study is expected to be completed very soon in October 2016.

— Follicum updated its website regarding  the second part of their clinical phase I/IIa study for their FOL-005 hair loss product.  I like the fact that they are undertaking some of this work at the reputable Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany.  Follicum also sent out an e-mail to many people (one of whom was myself) and here is the gist of it:

“The study is divided in two parts, a single ascending dose part and a multiple dose part.  Multiple dosing has begun on healthy volunteers.  The study has now finalized recruiting volunteers and is fully recruited, it is being carried out in Germany at: Klinik für Dermatologie, Venerologie und Allergologie, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany.  As this is a regulated clinical trial results have to be published once the trial is completed and all the results have been analysed, which is estimated to be in January 2017.”

— A conference on the Wnt signaling pathway ran from 14th-17th September in the Czech Republic.  Interestingly, Samumed was one of the main sponsors.  Of even more importance, it seems like Samumed made an extremely interesting and well received presentation at the 13th Medical Innovation Summit in London on September 17th 2016.  Why do I say that without seeing the actual presentation?  Because of numerous Tweets praising it…see this blog’s recent Twitter feed and thanks to commentator “Optimism” who notified me of the Twitter praise for Samumed’s presentation.

— Commentator “richieron” mentioned something about this Brotzu lotion group buy from an Italian blogger (I linked to that same blog in my July “brief items of interest” post).  Read this for more on Dr. Brotzu.  I cannot recommend buying from strangers on the internet, but nevertheless, interesting to follow.

— The Follicle Thought blog had an extensive interview with HairCell CEO Howard Leonhardt.

— One of the commentators on this forum named “skin” has created a thread on his dermarolling treatment on the Bald Truth forums. He made some interesting comments in this old post of mine that are worth reading, especially if you are considering trying out dermarolling.

— Lengthy article on hair loss, including some thoughts from Dr. Claire Higgins.

— Yet another study on the genetics behind hair loss.

— Scalp micropigmentation video on Quartz.

— Troy Hurtubise wants to cure hair loss.  This is about as far fetched as it will ever get in our already way-out-there hair loss cure world.

— Donald Trump lets Jimmy Fallon mess up his hair:

And now on to medical items of interest:

— Burned firefighter Pat Hardison continues to thrive one year after his face transplant.  Pretty amazing progression via monthly images in here.

— MIT scientist claims that his pill is the one when it comes to the fountain of youth.  Most important (and discouraging for us) quote:

“Guarente has been taking Basis for two years, but it’s a good bet that he is not among those who have observed hair growth as one of the pill’s effects.” 

— World’s formerly fattest man who lost 658 pound after gastric bypass surgery in 2010 will now get a second free surgery to remove excess skin.

— OxSyBio’s 3D “droplet printing” technology creates a tissue-like material that functions just like real cells.

— Embryos from skin cells instead of from eggs?  And of course artificial wombs. Would mean real freedom for both men and women.

— Infertile mice give birth due to 3D printed ovaries.

— Stem cell therapy restores arm and hand movement for a paralyzed man.

— New drug to treat Alzheimer’s could be very effective.

—  Lysyl oxidase inhibition could eliminate scar formation.

— Cold plasma to heal wounds.

— CRISPR’d vegetables are now here.

— With Japanese electronics behemoth Kyocera partnering with Tsuji/RIKEN and their cell based work, it is perhaps not surprising that in the US General Electric now aims to build a $1 billion business “offering vital manufacturing tools for a coming wave of cell therapies.”

— Manufacturing dopamine in the brain with gene therapy.

— Dramatic advances in human-on-a-chip technology will likely lead to a significant reduction in animal testing.  As it is, we in the hair loss world have seen almost zero benefit from many decades of research on mice.  These chips are going to be a much better approximation of real human beings in comparison to mice it seems.

FYI — Dr. Kemp has told me that he welcome’s blog reader questions so please post them in the comments to this post in a civil manner.  If I end up taking up his slide presentation offer, I will ask him the questions when we talk.  Edit: Mr. Kemp is answering them directly in the comments.

Update: One of this blog’s regular readers sent me an excellent summary regarding HairClone’s likely UK testing approach that is worth pasting here:

“It seems like UK regulatory laws allow clinicians a good deal of leeway in testing.  So the idea is that rather than being locked into a protocol that is submitted and approved for clinical trial at great expense, not to mention moving along at a glacial speed, they could test and tweak, patient by patient, on a much quicker and less expensive basis with no regulatory approval needed for changes in protocol as they tweak from patient to patient.  US laws do not allow this.  And if new research comes available, like the culturing method described in the recent wharton’s jelly post for example, they could quickly gear those changes up for testing in a new patient.  Of course, they could have any number of protocols going at the same time.  Conceptually, I think this is a very clever, not to mention practical, idea as you only need to spend the big bucks on the FDA trial after you know the protocol works.  Since this involves cell culturing of ones own cells I assume it falls relatively low on the risk scale and a loophole well suited for hair research.”

Background

After I published a post on new company HairClone several weeks ago, I got an unexpected (but welcome)  e-mail from the company’s CEO Dr. Paul Kemp.   I responded to Mr. Kemp’s e-mail, he replied back, and I am pasting most of the contents of our communication below after getting his approval to do so.  Mr. Kemp offered to share some presentation slides with me, but I was on vacation and preferred waiting till returning home.  I will probably get in touch with him again soon, although I am unsure if I want to devote a third post to HairClone in just one month!

In our e-mail correspondence below, I learnt some very interesting things, and perhaps the most surprising of these was the fact that Mr. Kemp was formerly the founder and CEO of Intercytex.  I covered Intercytex in the past and read about the company numerous times many years ago, but had completely forgotten ever reading Mr. Kemp’s name.  In Mr. Kemp’s e-mails, the parts about UK clinical trials potentially moving along faster and about the Hiroshima University technology licensing are very interesting.

I am highly skeptical of HairClone moving along faster than the Tsuji team or Shiseido (both in Japan), but I find Dr. Paul Kemp to be sincere, and, without any doubt whatsoever, his past 2-3 decades of experience in this type of work makes him extremely well qualified. Maybe if I end up seeing Mr. Kemp’s presentation slides I will get more interested in HairClone, but I suspect I need to brush up on my scientific knowledge before checking out those slides.

Mr. Paul Kemp’s first e-mail to me:

“Thanks for mentioning us on your blog and I just wanted to offer to find a way to answer some of the responses in a hopefully constructive way.  I would therefore be very happy to chat with you and answer any questions that you may have.

We are certainly not a “get rich quick” or “snake oil” company which is one of the main reasons that we have taken the investment approach that we have.  We have been involved at a senior level in a number of biotech companies and have had an enormous amount of experience in raising VC and other funds.  We have seen first hand how the influence of all this investment can misdirect the work and how management can lose control of what they feel should be done in return for short term gains.  We wanted to do something different here and involve those directly involved in developing this treatment so that things weren’t abandoned if things needed more work.  As well as raising funds and operating biotechs, we have also between us run around 20 different cell therapy clinical trials in the US and Europe.  Some of these have resulted in approved therapies, but we also understand the huge expense and risk of failure in this approach.  As you know, several companies have shown less than optimum responses with this “one shot” clinical trial approach when trying to develop a cell therapy for hair regeneration and have dropped out.

All the funds that we raise will go into the development of a treatment and the intention is that we will take small iterative steps, combining increases in our understanding of how dermal papilla cells change during cell culture and how to minimize these changes during multiplication and how these cultured cells will behave and interact with hair follicles when re-implanted in the scalp.  Only when we have a process and treatment that works in the clinic, will we then use this information to design a full clinical trial which will then have a much greater chance of success.

I am very happy to discuss this in detail if you are interested and hopefully we can convince you that our approach is genuine and has a much higher chance of success than previous attempts.

regards

Paul

Paul Kemp PhD
Founder, Chief Executive Director”

My Response to Mr. Paul Kemp’s first e-mail to me:

“Hi Dr. Kemp!

Thanks for your e-mail.

I am currently travelling, but would still like to talk to you when I return.

I have to admit that I am skeptical about your company because you are a ways away from commencing clinical trials, and there are others such as Dr. Tsuji/RIKEN, Shiseido and Histogen that are much further ahead and are aiming for product releases around 2020 or earlier.

Am also curious about Intercytex (see latter part of below post) since you still seem to work for them:

http://www.hairlosscure2020.com/lessons-from-aderans-and-intercytexs-hair-multiplication-failures/

Hope to be in touch with you soon.

Admin”

Mr. Paul Kemp’s second e-mail to me:

“Thanks for getting back to me. We could chat through either Skype or Webex.  The latter would be easier, as I can then walk you through our slide presentation.  I can understand your skepticism but I would hope I can explain our strategy to you and reduce that. I am very aware of the status of the work at Histogen, Replicel and Organ Technologies and personally know the key players involved.

As to Intercytex, I founded that way back in 2000. We raised a lot of VC money which enabled us to carry out the first cell therapy clinical trial about 10 years ago.  I felt although it wasn’t a slam dunk, it did indicate what to do next but the VC investors wanted us to move onto something with shorter timelines and we sold the technology to Aderans where a similar thing happened.  It is a feature of VC investment cycles is that they some of them aren’t in these things for the long term and they control the decisions.  Intercytex was broken up in 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis and I ran it for a few years in order to develop the last technology which was finally sold this year.  The company has no employees and no facilities and your comment has made me realize that I do need to come to closure on that.

The Claire Higgins et al’s PNAS paper a couple of years ago was the thing that really made me want to get back into this field.  When Intercytex ran their trial we had no way of knowing whether human dermal papilla cells, when expanded, maintained their hair inductive potential.  We licensed technology from Hiroshima University that used keratinocyte spent media which, in mice maintained inductive potential in DP cells so we did the only thing we could do at the time to test whether the same was true for human cells which was to run an incredibly expensive clinical trial only to show yet again that human cells don’t behave the same as mouse cells.

The Higgins paper has indicated a simple way to interrogate the cultured cells and determine their expression profile so we can now look at lots of ways to change culture conditions and test the outcome without having to resort to human trials.  Those already in trials are, to a large degree, “locked-in” to their processes because of the regulatory constraints imposed by agencies such as the FDA and EMA.

We have no such constraints as we aren’t yet committed to clinical trials and the UK regulations are such that Clinicians can legitimately treat patients pre-marketing license as long as some conditions are met.

We can therefore try lots of different alternatives before committing to the constraints imposed by the regulators when running clinical trials and we feel that the combination of the new science with the supportive regulatory system will allow us to move forward rapidly.

There is a LOT of hype and misinformation out there as you are no doubt aware both about results and timelines but also about the processes that are needed in order to develop, test and market a new medical treatment and part of that is due to industry not being able for confidentiality and investor reasons from reaching out to inform and educate.  We have none of those limits and all of the founders of HairClone are committed to informing people of our progress.  I am very willing to take however much time is needed to inform the “community” about what we are trying to do which I accept is different from the traditional way of developing a new therapy.

I first started working on cell therapy and regenerative medicine in 1987 and I have come to realize over the last few years that there is a better, cheaper, less risky strategy to develop new therapies and I think hair rejuvenation is the perfect platform to prove this.

Have a great time during your vacation.

Regards,

Paul

Paul Kemp PhD
Founder, Chief Executive Director”

For the past two decades, researchers and companies involved in the search for a hair loss cure have always been hindered by lack of sufficient funding. Promising avenues of research (e.g., read the last post’s section on Aderans and Intercytex) have had to be abandoned due to funding problems. Investors are always looking for quick returns and do not have the patience to wait for 5-10 years for oftentimes speculative animal model based research to turn into a successful commercial product release for use in humans.  Many world leading hair loss research scientists such as Dr. Claire Higgins, Dr. Roland Lauster and Dr. Alexey Terskikh have complained about the lack of funding in interviews and even on Twitter.

Multi-Billion Dollar Companies Arrive to the Hair Loss World

However, this situation is now changing rapidly. Multi-billion dollar multinational companies are entering the hair loss world (usually for the first time ever) via partnerships and/or acquisitions of existing small companies that are already primarily focused in the hair loss sector. Below I list in chronological order some recent examples of multi-billion dollar corporations entering the hair loss world either 1) directly; or 2) via acquisitions; or 3) via partnerships:

• In August 2016, Histogen (US) announced that it had raised $6 million in funding from Pineworld Capital, an affiliate of Huapont Life Sciences (China).  And a month later in September 2016, Histogen just updated us on the details of this China-specific collaboration.  “Pineworld will focus on clinical development, registration, marketing and sales of the Hair Stimulating Complex (HSC) injectable hair growth treatment in China.  Under the terms of the license, Histogen will receive milestone payments, a transfer price on the product, and escalating royalties on future sales.”  Huapont Life Sciences (SHE:002004) currently has a market cap of $2.9 billion when converted from Yuan.

• In probably the most important news that has ever graced the hair loss world, in July 2016, Japanese electronics giant Kyocera announced that it was entering the hair regeneration market via a collaboration with the Japanese government-affiliated RIKEN Institute/Dr. Takashi Tsuji and Organ Technologies (Japan).  As of today Kyocera (KYO) had a market cap of $18 billion.

• In June 2015, Allergan (Ireland/US) acquired US-based Kythera Biopharmaceuticals (along with its Setipiprant prostaglandin D2 antagonist product).  Allergan (AGN) currently has a market cap of $94 billion.

• In May 2013, Shiseido (Japan) announced a technology transfer and collaboration agreement with Replicel (Canada). Shiseido is the world’s fifth largest cosmetics producer per wikipedia with a current market cap (TYO:4911) of $10.4 billion when converted from Yen.

• Last but not least, privately-held Samumed (optimistically valued at $12 billion).  I am not sure of precisely when Samumed entered the hair loss world, but the company started clinical trials in Australia in early 2013.

Note: Honorary mention to Aclaris Therapeutics, which has  a market cap of $540 million.  The company entered the hair loss world in March 2016 with the acquisition of Vixen Pharmaceuticals.

China Also Arrives, Kind of…

While Histogen’s entry into China via Pineworld Capital/Huapont Life Sciences is not a testament to domestic hair loss research capabilities in China, at the moment I will take anything! Hopefully this will start a new trend in China just like we have witnessed in the US and Japan in the past decade, with hair loss research proliferating at numerous centers across those countries virtually every year.

Perhaps the most surprising thing on this blog in my three plus years of writing has been the lack of anything substantial happening in China (the world’s most populous country and the world’s second largest national economy after the US).  To date, the only professors that I have mentioned doing hair loss research in China are Dr. Zhi-Qi Hu and Dr. Chunyu Han (Note: I am not including those mentioned as part of study author listings).  Mr. Liu Xuewu obviously does not count as a professional researcher, but I will mention him again in the hopes that he comes out of retirement some day soon!

Considering that the Chinese were the first at genetically modifying human embryos in 2015, it is surprising that they have not fast tracked any type of hair loss research and cell based treatment programs.  Or maybe they have and we just do not know about them?

I was 50/50 about writing an entire post on JAK inhibitors, but in the end gave in due to the fact that I usually neglect the 1-2 percent of balding people who suffer from alopecia areata (AA) or the related conditions alopecia totalis and alopecia universalis.  For a majority of these people, JAK inhibitors clearly seem to be a cure assuming there are no long-term side effects.

There are also some new developments in the more controversial JAK inhibitors for androgenetic alopecia (AGA) patients discussion that are worth elaborating.  As is the norm when JAK related news comes out, the discussion in the prior post was taken over by this subject, in no small part due to “nasa_rs”.   I have let him run rampant in the comments section only because he came back after a lengthy break from this blog.  He will be allowed to continue posting the same stuff in the comments to this post, but thereafter I will become stricter.  It should be noted that despite his often repetitive comments, over the years “nasa_rs” has sent me some highly interesting and unique scientific information.  And recently, he was the first one out there to find the good news aboiut Alcaris Therapeutics adding JAK inhibitor trials for AGA patients to their website’s pipeline page.  As a side note, if I recall, “nasa_rs” really did or does work for NASA…a bit of a scary thought.

Two New Studies Support JAK Inhibitors Working on Alopecia Areata (AA) Patients

In 2014, two groundbreaking papers discussed complete reversal of hair loss in alopecia areata patients.  While this was justifiably by far the biggest news of the year in the hair loss world (and widely covered by the global media due to the spectacular before and after patient scalp photos), there was one problem: the first of these two studies only involved one patient of Dr. Brett King (on arthritis drug tofacitinib), and the second only involved three patients of Dr. Angela Christiano (all three on bone marrow cancer drug tuxolitinib).

Two weeks ago, two new larger studies were released that solidified the above findings:

1. Dr. Angela Christiano’s team from Columbia University in New York found that 75 percent of 12 patients with alopecia areata had successful hair regrowth while on ruxolitinib for between 3-6 months followed by a 3 month follow-up period.  By the end of treatment, average hair regrowth was 92 percent.  Perhaps the best part of the news: “The drug was well-tolerated in all participants, with no serious adverse events.”
2. Even more significant, a much larger joint study from Stanford University (led by Dr. Anthony Oro) and Yale University (led by Dr. Brett King) found that of 66 alopecia areata patients treated with tofacitinib, 64 percent of patients had a positive response to treatment (and 32 percent achieved an improvement of over 50 percent after only 3 months of therapy). Side effects were generally mild.

From the above studies, it seems like ruxolitinib is better than tofacitinib when it comes to treating alopecia areata.  It remains to be see if results are even better when treatment is continued for a longer duration when it comes to either of the above two drugs. Note that a number of other newer JAK inhibitors will get approved and come onto the market in the US in the coming years.

Finally, for those who do suffer from alopecia areata, this is by far the best place in the internet to connect with others such as yourself.

JAK Inhibitors for Androgenetic Alopecia (AGA)

Some good news, some bad news and some in-between news here.

The Good:

• First, from the 12 patient study article link I posted in the above section, Dr. Christiano still seems optimistic about JAK inhibitors working for AGA per the following quote:

“The CUMC research team plans to expand their studies to include testing these drugs in other conditions such as vitiligo, scarring alopecias, and androgenetic alopecia (pattern baldness) where they may also show efficacy. “We expect JAK inhibitors to have widespread utility across many forms of hair loss based on their mechanism of action in both the hair follicle and immune cells,” said Dr. Christiano.

The Bad:

• However, Dr. King who in the past thought that it was worth testing JAK inhibitors (especially topical ones) for AGA now seems pessimistic according to this article:

“King said it is doubtful that Xeljanz (=tofacitinib) will work for the most common types of hair loss (such as male pattern baldness), which are not the result of an autoimmune disease.”

Note that both Dr. Christiano and Dr. King are listed as advisers to Alcaris Therapeutics in the conflict of interest section of the earlier linked 66 patient study summary page.

The In-Between:

• One important bit of information on JAKs and AGA that never received the attention it should have (partly because I did not cover this subject much in recent months) happened a few months ago when Solomon interviewed Dr. Eddie Wang (who previously worked with Dr. Angela Christiano).  According to Solomon, Dr. Wang “rated JAKs success chance for AGA 5 out of 10“.  Dr. Wang seemed to think that JAKs could be reducing microinflammation in AGA patients and that could help hair growth.  I contacted him about how he came up with this 5/10 estimate, but he never responded.  I wold put this development under “good news” if Dr. Wang had responded with a detailed answer.

Two (or More) Variants of AGA?

I have mentioned in the past that it seems like a majority of balding people have significant itching and dandruff in their balding regions, while some balding people have none of those annoyances whatsoever.  I always wonder if the people who have this itching and dandruff associated with their balding also have a significant inflammation (and maybe even autoimmune) component to their hair loss?  If topical JAK inhibitors do end up helping people with AGA, will those with significant itching benefit more?  I would not at all be surprised if researchers some day find that AGA patients can be broadly split into two main camps.

Pharmacologic Inhibition of JAK-STAT Signaling Promotes Hair Growth

Finally, while I discussed this October 2015 study on this blog before as part of a lengthy post, I keep finding new items of interest in there.  I therefore thought it was worth pointing out the study again here in the hopes that some of the readers with a scientific background can give us more feedback on the contents.  Dr. Angela Christiano and Dr. Claire Higgins are both co-authors of this study. Some of the more interesting quotes:

“Hair growth after JAK-STAT inhibition mimics normal anagen initiation by activating the Wnt (Note: this is what Samumed is focusing on) and Shh signaling pathways.”

“JAK-STAT inhibition causes activation of hair follicle (HF) progenitor cells.”  (Note: also see this important patent filed in 2013: “Jak inhibitors for activation of epidermal stem cell populations”).

“Inhibition of JAK-STAT signaling improves skeletal muscle regeneration in aged mice.”

“Tofacitinib treatment promotes inductivity of dermal papilla (DP).”

“In human hair follicle assays, we show that JAK inhibition via tofacitinib treatment increases the growth rate of anagen hair shafts (skin grafts and organotypic culture assays) and enhances the inductivity of human DP spheres (neogenesis assays).  It is surprising that ruxolitinib treatment did not improve the inductivity of human DP spheres, despite the fact that it increased the rate of growth in the organ culture model. We postulate that down-regulation of proapoptotic signals in tofacitinib-treated spheres, which did not occur in ruxolitinib-treated spheres, may promote survival of DP cells, leading to enhanced hair growth in this assay.”

Over the past two years, perhaps the single most popular subject that I have been asked to provide my opinion on and have not is with regards to Dr. Christophe Guillemat (of the CFS Barcelona clinic in Spain) and his Stem Cell Transfer (SCT) hair transplantation technique.  Till now, I have avoided discussing this man because there was similar excitement about Dr. Coen Gho and his donor hair regeneration technique some 5-10 years ago, and to this day I am not sure if Dr. Gho is really getting any significant level of hair regeneration consistently (assuming the partial hairs that he transplants to the frontal and crown regions of patient scalps all grow in the first place).

The biggest problem with such claims of donor hair regeneration is that patients can not really precisely tell what portion of their donor hair (if any at all) regenerated, so we are reliant on a surgeon’s word. Donor region pictures of the back of the scalp also never tell you for sure what portion of hair has regenerated.  Even with zero hair regeneration in regular hair transplants, donor regions typically never look like they are balding in spite of having much less density than prior to transplantation.

Dr. Gho has attracted a lot of skepticism over the years from other hair transplant surgeons. Moreover, I would have thought that by now he could have made a fortune if he were to have taught his potentially revolutionary technique to other surgeons for a very high fee, instead of still continuing to perform hair transplants himself. Nevertheless, I do not doubt his technique entirely, since there does seem some sound logic behind the idea that leaving some stem cells behind could lead to donor follicle regeneration.

Dr. Christophe Guillemat

Going back to the subject matter, I finally decided to cover Dr. Guillemat because five days ago he published a groundbreaking (or fluff piece, depending on your perspective) blog post that is a must read. You will need to translate it into English via right clicking in your browser and selecting “Translate to English” or via using the Google Translate webpage.  Dr. Guillemat wrote the post after seeing extremely positive results in three patients’ donor hair regeneration one year post stem cell transplantation.

The title of Dr. Guillemat’s blog post when translated reads “Resounding success in hair generation with stem cells“!  Some of the other overly extravagant sentences in the translation that I have pasted below made me laugh with disbelief, but I do hope that they are all true and I prove to be very wrong in my skepticism:

“We’ve got an average of 82% of hair regeneration with stem cells in the donor area !!!”

“It is the first time in the history of hair transplants that such an important hair regeneration is achieved” — Note: I wonder if Dr. Gho agrees?

“In short, the process works and can say that we are at the beginning of a new era for the correction of baldness”

“To this day, there was no technique that allows hair implants recover such amount of follicles in the donor area!”

“The stem cell transfer is a reality”

“Revolutionary technique that allows patients to repopulate a bald area without losing their hair capital in the donor area.”

To be fair to Dr. Guillemat, despite the overly emotional language, he does mention some limitations and areas that need improvement:

• Only 50-60 percent growth in recipient areas and 82 percent hair regeneration in donor area (both numbers will need improving).
• Cell transfer is a much more delicate procedure in comparison to entire hair follicle transfer.

Dr. Guillemat is going to publish more patient information, photos and videos on his blog in the coming days.  If you are really interested in this technique, you should also read his past blog posts, see some of his youtube videos and follow him on Twitter.

As always, thanks to commentator “Mike” who regularly seems to find the latest developments with Follica immediately.  He notified us of the updated Follica website earlier today in a comment to the last post.

I have covered Follica (a subsidiary of US-based PureTech Health) many time on this blog before in spite of the fact that until recently I was very skeptical about the company (since it was founded ten years ago, but has yet to commercialize its skin perturbation + topical compound technology despite years or supportive evidence). Moreover, some people on hair loss forums have over the years postulated that the company’s technology is basically just glorified Minoxidil, since skin damage allows for greater penetration of Minoxidil.  However, the company has never specified what compound it is using, and I highly doubt it is just Minoxidil.  In some of their patents they have mentioned various potential ingredients including Minoxidil, but I am too lazy to go through all the links in my past Follica posts at the moment to get the details.

I bolded the words “until recently” above because a few months ago, Follica pleasantly surprised us and announced that it was aiming for a 2018 product release as a best-case scenario.

Now it seems like Follica just made a major upgrade to its previously barren website.  Nothing really of major surprise in there, but much better elaboration of the technology with useful photos/product renditions.  We already knew that the skin disruption process (which requires great precision and knowhow) would be undertaken at a doctor’s office and the compound application would be the responsibility of the patient at his or her home.  Now Follica has provided images of both the in-office and at-home devices.  The company will have a smartphone app to monitor progress (Edit: It seems like the app will also be able to measure the accuracy of your dosage via wirelessly communicating with the at-home device).

No information is provided about the costs, but they do discuss re-ordering of the compound, which makes me wonder if this will be a lifelong commitment just like with Minoxidil?  Assuming that you do get new hair follicles, how susceptible will they be to the ravages of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), and will taking Finasteride or Dutasteride to reduce DHT levels prevent the need for re-ordering Follica’s compound?

Some key quotes from Follica’s new website:

“We’ve teamed up with leading dermatologists with expertise in hair loss and epithelial stem cell biology to develop a new system aimed at not just improving existing hair growth, but also growing new hair”.

“Our technology is based on a proprietary approach intended to create an “embryonic window” in adult skin, allowing new follicles and new hair to form from epithelial stem cells”.

“Following skin disruption, cells that migrate to help healing are forced to make a decision: Should I make epidermis, or should I make a hair? There is a window of opportunity in which we can potentially push them to choose the latter, and we believe there are multiple biological pathways to target to enhance this outcome. This regenerative effect is called hair follicle neogenesis”.

Dr. George Cotsarelis and his own Hair Loss

Finally, if anyone lives near where Dr. George Cotsarelis (Follica’s co-founder and technology inventor) works in Pennsylvania, it would be good to know if the small bald patch on the back of his head (see initial seconds of below videos after you press play) is gone or still there.  I am very serious and do not mean to belittle Dr. Cotsarelis (and hope he does not mind), but I feel like most people who can fill back a small bald patch on their crown region would always do so if they had the technology at their disposal. Usually, only those who totally shave their heads are comfortable with their hair loss, while those with small bald spots are not.  Maybe I am being too judgmental here and Dr. Cotsarelis does not care about his minor hair loss at all?  But if he were to suddenly have thick hair at the top/rear of his scalp, I would get even more excited about Follica.

Dr. Cotsarelis has been involved in hair loss research for at least 20 years as far as I can tell, and there is no-one in the world who has been cited in hair loss related magazine articles as much as him.  For those who are interested, in some of my past blog posts about Follica, I have discussed and linked to various wounding related patents and studies attributed at least in part to Dr. Cotsarelis.

Hair loss news first:

— Update: A day after I wrote this post, CNN covered JAK inhibitors in a new article (in a pleasant surprise, they also looked at the androgenetic alopecia — AGA — angle).  Usually, all these articles on JAK inhibitors only look at alopecia areata (AA).  Yet again, Dr. Christiano says she is optimistic that JAKs could work on AGA patients (but only in a topical form).  Dr. Brett King is not optimistic, but he is still testing it out (in a lotion form) on his AA patients (probably the ones who also have AGA).  In the above article, the one AA patient who they show with regrown hair after being on oral JAK inhibitors did not regrow hair that he lost to AGA, although it is impossible to tell whether he did not regrow 100 percent of his AGA hair loss or not.  In any event, we will only know for sure about this once they test topical JAK inhibitors out so people should not get so emotional about this subject each time there are new developments.  You should also not try to test your own topical version as even the experts are having a hard time developing the appropriate version.  According to Dr. Christiano:

“Though she thinks men might have the same success with an ointment, she said the trick is that it has to penetrate properly. Compared with the paper-thin skin of mice, human skin is “much thicker, and it’s oily, and it’s deep, and it’s got a fat layer — so there’s a lot to think about when making a good topical formula.”

It is well worth watching the video in the above article just to see the funky haired mice.

— In a first, myself as well as all of this blog’s commentators missed the important International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS)’s 24th Annual Congress that ran from September 28th through October 1st in Las Vegas.  I did not even see any threads on the conference in any of the hair loss forums out there, which is strange.  I usually cover the 2-3 most important hair loss related conferences in the world every year in separate posts, but this time I forgot to do so.  You can find the detailed ISHRS 24th Congress final program guide here.  As usual, there were way too many interesting presentations.  For our purposes, the most important ones were:

• Dr. Angela Christiano: “JAK Inhibitors, Hair Regeneration and
  Genetic Testing”.
• Dr. Pantelis Rompolas: “Potency and Contribution of Stem Cells to Hair Follicle Regeneration”.
• Dr. Rodney Sinclair: “Advancing our Understanding of the Biology of Androgenetic Alopecia and Changing the way we use Minoxidil to Treat it”.
• Dr. Angela Christiano and Dr. Ken Washenik led a discussion titled “Biotechnology in Hair Regeneration”.

On Twitter, Dr. Alan Bauman told me that while Dr. Christiano did not provide any data on JAK inhibitors for androgenetic alopecia (AGA), she did hint that JAK inhibitors seem to stimulate the anagen phase of the hair growth cycle.  Fingers crossed as usual when it comes to this subject.  I was surprised at the number of presentations on body hair transplants (BHT), with Dr. Arvind Poswal discussing long-term ten-year plus results of his BHT patients.  Also surprising were the number of presentations on platelet-rich plasma (PRP).

— In stark contrast to the above glaring omission, in the past week at least 10 (!) people either commented under a blog post or e-mailed me about cosmetics behemoth L’oréal (France) and Poietis (France) partnering to bioprint hair follicles via laser. This news item was extremely well covered across the global media and there are hundreds of articles on the internet about this interesting subject matter.  The end goal “holy grail” of this research will be to implant the new hair follicles into balding regions.  Below is the official company video outlining the technology and the goals behind this partnership:

— Unfortunately, it seems like Replicel has not fulfilled the contractual obligations of its partnership with Shiseido (although the former disputes this allegation).  In any event, it is unlikely that this will stop Shiseido from proceeding with its plans.

— Cassiopeia (Italy) updates us on its topical anti-androgen product Breezula (formerly called CB-03-01).  Also see my past post on this subject.  It seems like even if phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials succeed, this product will not come to market before 2021.

— Samumed’s Dr. Osman Kibar’s presentation (a small part of it is on hair loss) at a recent conference organized by the UK’s Royal Society of Medicine.  He received many compliments on Twitter for his presentation.

— Cellmid has better than expected quarterly sales of its FGF5 inhibiting product Evolis in Australia.

— Kerastem completes enrollment in Phase 2 clinical trials.

— Dr. Ken Williams and his government funded trials for injecting adipose derived stem cells (ADSC) into patient scalps to help hair growth.  You can still register for the trials if you are in the US.

— Spex has a brand new updated website, which is worth a visit.

— Former baseball great Jose Canseco just announced today that he will get a hair transplant with Dr. Parsa Mohebi next week.

— Sportscaster Joe Buck’s hair transplant addiction nearly cost him his voice and his career.

— The benefits of going bald.  I would much rather have none of those benefits and hair instead:-)

— Men’s vanity involves hair transplants.

And now on to medical items of interest:

— The National Geographic is a highly reputable magazine so I believe them when they say that ending blindness is no longer just a dream.

— Rapamycin could make your dog (and maybe humans too) live longer.

— Microsoft aims to cure cancer in ten years.  In the end it is just a programming error.

— A very interesting new endeavor: “Human Cell Atlas project aims to map the human body’s 35 trillion cells“.

— Teeth regeneration advances.

— Building a bionic spine.

— 3D printing continues to revolutionize the field of prosthetic limbs.

— First “three person baby” born in Mexico (doctors went there from the USA so as to escape strict regulations).  Baby’s parents were Jordanian.  Medicine will hopefully soon become very multinational.

— Stem cells regenerate damaged monkey heart.

— Yet more evidence that turmeric is very good for you, but only when added to food that is then cooked.

— Endurance training causes positive genetic changes.

— Not sure if I believe half the stuff in the below video, but it is well presented with 100 percent thumbs up likes thus far: K. Comella: “Reversing Aging with Stem Cells”: