Tissuse Interview, Ask Your Questions Here!

[Swoop]

Hey guys,

We did a interview last time with Organ Technologies which can be found here.

It's time for a new interview! This time we have the awesome opportunity to ask questions to TissUse.

I suggest that you guys have a look over at their site.

Their goal now is to start clinical trials in 2017/2018.

They envision that the their method should allow for generation of 10000 hair follicles out of 30 hair follicles.

Some extra content:

It seems that they will be culturing dermal papilla cells and combining them with skin HDMECS (Human Dermal Microvascular Endothelial Cells). This should give rise to a "neopapillae", which is a precursor of a hair follicle. By implanting those neopapillae, they should give birth to brand new hair follicles in the scalp. It is pretty comparable to the method of Riken/Kyocera/Organ Technologies.

As far as I understand, they will be also using these neopapillae and co-culturing them with keratinocytes and melanocytes to form "micro hair follicles" which can be used as an in vitro screening model tool to find compounds that inhibit or promote hair growth. Basically just to establish a better model for drug testing than those pesky rodents .

So yeah shoot your questions and we'll forward them to this awesome team !

Deadline to present your questions is till Friday 20 January. Thank you.

 

[SwissGuy]

Do they have an approximately release date, like 2025? (I guess it will take some time when the trials just start this year)

 

[Nadia1972]

Will we have a treatment when the hens will have teeth?

 

[inham123]

I'd like to know if using this method it's possible to achieve normal density (i.e. 100 grafts/cm2), from what I read that isn't possible with current transplants, even with multiple surgeries.

I'd also like to know if the implantation of the neopapilae is different from implanting a normal graft, and whether it can be automated or something else to reduce cost, as the neopapileas are already available to the doctor and their will be no concern of wasting grafts..

I'm also interested in the expected cause and whether the company thinks this will be a functional cure for baldness and whether the hair density/texture/color/thickness etc will be the same as normal hair from a non-bald person.

And then I'm of course interested in cost.

Maybe they can give us more info on their time line and on their clinical trials. Who are they trialing it on, how many people, are they gonna make photo's, what are the goals of the trial (is it to induce hair growth with same density/texture/thickness/color of normal hair?).

 

[Follisket]

Can they start their clinical trials in 2012 instead?

 

[InBeforeTheCure]

Wow. Would they be able to grow micro hair follicles using DPCs taken from balding scalp and test drugs/genetic manipulations on them or would those cells be too damaged to grow micro hair follicles at all?

 

[MomoGee]

When is the expect release date? At the end of the day that's the only thing that matter to me.

 

[ThecureIsnear]

*Will there be any specific requirements to be a suitable candidate for this procedure?
*Their goal for clinical trial is 2017/2018, when will we have a guarantee that they started clinical trials?
*If clinical trials are a success how long will we have to wait for the procedure to be commercially available?(will it be by 2020 )
*If i had a hair transplant done prior to this procedure. Will they be able to regrow hair where this transplanted hairs are?
* How much will it cost?

 

[Jaym]

It would be interesting to hear if they have tried any pre clinical studies in unfavourable conditions.

Eg bald scalp expresses a lot of PGD2 and fibrosis.

With Tsuji I felt like they were still ironing things out so why not just ask - have they created and seen a fully cycling human hair from this technique with full gene expression. None of chimeric bs.

It would also be Interesting to know how far along in the hf development they can wait till implantation. I.e if you have a lot of scaring or high PGD2 levels then relying on neopapillae to interact with surrounding tissue might not be successful. And it might be more successful with a more mature hf in burn patients/transplants in donor areas ect. Since we know an adult hf can be used in a strip scar ect. They might already have seen some evidence for this.

 

[That Guy]

I'll think of some questions later because right now I'm harder than chinese algebra over the fact there will be a tissuse interview

 

[KO1]

Will the DP stay intact after implanted in Androgenetic Alopecia skin?

 

[mr_robot]

Glad to see hellouser on the case!

 

[constrictedvoid]

Can they grow in hair transplant recipient area? What about hair transplant donor area? What about growing eyebrows?

 

[Roberto_72]

* who will be able to perform the procedure? will present hair transplant surgeons be able to use this technique on what would have been FUE or FUT patients?

 

[Tracksterderm]

I guess most of the questions from the Tsuji / Riken / Organ applies.

• Have they considered several markets or where will they start trials? Could it be quicker to market in Japan?
• Which obstacles are they facing before they can initiate trials?
• How is their financial situation for bringing this to market?
• How do they view their competition? Which ones are they aware of, and why will TissUse be competitive?

 

[Nadia1972]

Will the clinical trials begin one day if they are not afraid of the ridiculous (and that they will have pocketed the money of the sponsors thanks to their blabla) ?

 

[That Guy]

Most of my questions are the same as tracksterderm except one, and it's a bit detailed :

Similar methods plan to leverage transplant surgeons rather than their own clinic.

Does TissUse plan to do this as well? A big problem I see with this approach is an artificial inflation of the cost by people who are used to performing invasive surgeries that enables them to charge tens of thousands of dollars. I don't see these guys working for less even if it means more customers. They could charge whatever they want for unlimited hair. According to the TissUse site, this could be done by a one man team, so the majority of the cost should be culturing rather than labour?

 

[Gone]

I'd like to know if using this method it's possible to achieve normal density (i.e. 100 grafts/cm2), from what I read that isn't possible with current transplants, even with multiple surgeries.

I'd also like to know if the implantation of the neopapilae is different from implanting a normal graft

 

[WereInaRecession]

The best part is the guys in the video are NW7 so they have some skin in the game, you cant make this sh*t up.

 

[Grasshüpfer]

Will we have a treatment when the hens will have teeth?

You can already do that no problem. Teeth are still in birds genome, it's (not sure about that though) actually quite a simple switch.