Look, OP, you're right in that 5 years away is a lofty goal given the fact that 1) hair loss research is not well funded and 2) bringing a product to the market is a difficult and time-consuming endeavor and 3) the fundamental underlying mechanism of hairloss remains elusive yet.
So if an advancement of state of the art were to be available in the next 5 years, it would necessarily be something we already know about
right now. Thus, an argument about whether or not something will be released "soon" comes down to how you evaluate the strategies currently being pursued as products. That would be Shiseido, Tsuji, Brotzu, Follica, etc.
IT IS PERFECTLY REASONABLE TO BE SKEPTICAL OF ANY OF THESE APPROACHES. Everyone, especially the enthusiasts in the Brotzu thread, should know this. But I think it is important to note that that skepticism and discussion does not necessarily objectively inform us whether or not to be optimistic or pessimistic - that comes from one's interpretation of the state of the art. At the end of the day, considering that we are dealing with an unknown mechanism, and employing drugs and strategies that may or may not have to act selectively, and that may or may not be difficult to deliver, and that may or may not result in unforeseen and undesirable side-effects, on top of balancing the additional constraints of being able to deliver a scalable, cost-effective product that provides benefit over the incumbent technology and also sustains benefit for years to come....there are many unknowns.
In my opinion, what that means is that you can speculate all you want, but there is a lot of merit in actually running the experiment and seeing the results. Not just because we would then gain definite objective insights into the treatments, but also because THE DATA FROM TRYING NEW THINGS WILL IN TURN TEACH US SOMETHING NEW ABOUT THE PROBLEM AT HAND, THEREBY ADVANCING THE STATE OF THE ART. This IS how things progress, because when you try something it doesn't work, well now you know what won't work and why! Yes at the end of the day, nobody gives a sh*t about the mechanism - they just want their hair. But to have a really good, safe product and to claim that humanity has bested a problem that people have been discussing and lamenting for LITERALLY MILLENNIA, I think you actually have to lay out the groundwork and know what the f*** is going on. Yes there are serendipitous discoveries like minoxidil but then again, people complain about some side effects of minoxidil and it doesn't appear to work for everyone; the problem with such a serendipitous discovery is that when you don't know how it works, it is very difficult to improve. So the way we
really beat the problem forever is by understanding it.
Ok so suppose that you do not like any of the current products that are the closest to market and you think they do not work. Fine, but even if hairloss is not well funded, that doesn't mean research in this arena cannot advance quickly.
In general, the peripheral technologies that we know and love today - gaming consoles, iphones, homes, cars, clothes - were founded on the backbone of large advancements given to us by the industrial revolutions. Listed in order, they are as follow:
(early 1800s) First I.R.: agriculture, machines/factories/manufacturing/mining,
(early 1900s) Second I.R.:chemical industries/petroleum, automotive industry, electrical industries (analog electronics and power generation)
(mid-late 1900s) Third I.R.: Digital revolution (most electronics we interact with today), internet; (i.e. personal computers, information technology)
(soon in future) Fourth I.R.: Autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, 3D printing, quantum computing, the internet of things, and sort of a combination of some of the previously mentioned areas - robotics.
The broad advancements listed above are what enabled the thousands of products we interact with today. Advancements in the arenas listed above are probably the best gauge of how quickly our technology is advancing. And the thing is, if you look at the timeline shown above - we went from NO FACTORIES to present day in ~200 years. The point is that the advancement is exponential and exponential growth is not trivial to predict. Think of when the iPhone hit the market. That wasn't that long ago. We went from flip phones to watching youtube videos on the go. We have a black box in our pockets that can bring us answers to any questions we have, wherever we are. In absolute terms, that's a pretty fast change.
Moore's law is a gauge of how quickly computation and memory storage advanced. The most important thing to note about Moore's law is that it is exponential - that's why we are in 2017 with amazing graphics on our phones when our parents played pong on a tube T.V. to kill time.
And here is the cost of sequencing a genome as a function of time. It appears to be exponential on an already logarithmic scale!
The truth is biotechnology has only begun to flourish because 1) people have spent the last few decades grinding and learning a lot about the fundamental chemistry and physics behind biology and 2) the COST OF RUNNING EXPERIMENTS HAS GONE DOWN A LOT.
The second thing is the MOST important thing. It will cost LESS to investigate hair loss as a problem as backbone technologies improve. Hairloss will become an increasingly easier problem to solve, as it becomes more and more reasonable to rapidly and cost-effectively probe the underlying mechanism behind hairloss. Additionally, everything we try now will add to our growing knowledge of what will work and what won't so the solution to the problem will grow in a compounded manner. The eventual cure is inevitable. I'm sure most people see it this way also.
The final point, which addresses the main issue with the thread - whether or not a technology will be out in 5 or 10 or 15 years - since things are improving exponentially, progress may appear to feel "linear" on a year-to-year basis but it is not. It's not that trivial to predict what the state of the art will be like in 5 years, especially if the technology is very close to one of the exponentially growing backbone technologies. For example, I wager that it will be very difficult to describe what phones will be like 10 or 15 years from now. We know we are rapidly advancing.
Hairloss would be solved for a very long period of time if we could do one of two things:
1) Selectively deliver drugs. We know several antiandrogens that will work if we can prevent them from going systemic.
2) Fabrication/autologous transplantation, i.e. follicle regeneration. If we can make follicles or parts of them, we know how to put them back in the body.
Both of those problems sit at the heart of biotechnology because solving either would have very broad and transformative effects on society and medicine. Even if people work on those problems in other systems, for example, selectively delivering drugs to cancer cells or fabrication of organs for transplantation, the advances in those fields will carryover to hair loss.
It's the same research. You do realize that Tsuji is really not interested in hair, they are working on hair first so they can move on to creating vital organs.
It's exactly as he says, check out this book that Tsuji worked on:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-6949-4. It's a cookbook for how to make different organ tissues in lab. This was published this year. Here is my favorite bedtime story from that book:
Functional Tooth Regeneration
by Masamitsu Oshima, Miho Ogawa, and Takashi Tsuji
They transplanted a ball of cultured cells into a bony hole made in the mouse's jaw and it assembled into a tooth and erupted as normal.
It is guaranteed that we in this generation will see more technological advancement in our lifetime, than any human being in the past has experienced in their lifetimes. And since alopecia falls within the types of problems we are interested in solving today, and aligns with the rapid advances we predict in biotechnology, the chances of significant advancements in near future, in my opinion, are high. There will likely be an advancement within our lifetime.