Follica - Good News!

[first]

Thanks for your info First, just out of interest did you consider that the the high absorption rate of lithium chloride (as oppose to orotate) may not need as extreme a penetrating solvent as DMSO, so ethanol might be a good alternative (and much safer). I suppose this depends on whether you're using DMSO for its properties as a solvent only or whether you believe it confers other advantages; I've heard it might have an affect on beta-catenin binding/production.

I am a bit hesitant to use ethanol as it's an antiseptic which denatures protein. That is more of a general concern though, I do not know its specific effect on for example beta-catenin protein. Also, the EGF inhibitor I've sent my eyes on at the moment will only dissolve in DMSO, not in ethanol.

As for DMSO in itself, there are quite a bit of people that claim it will help regrow hair (MSM, which is quite similar, definitely does help with hair in general). While ethanol may work deteriorate beta-catenin, DMSO should improve it, which is exactly what we want.

This is what immortal hair wrote about it;

DMSO boosts Wnt signaling and increases levels of beta-catenin.

DMSO is a co-factor with Lithium Orotate, as Lithium downregulates glycogen synthase kinase-3beta (GSK-3b). GSK-3b inhibits the activity of the Wnt pathway. Lithium suppresses GSK-3b, allowing an increase in Wnt signaling via DSMO. Moreover, GSK-3b upregulates the apoptoic protein Bcl-2, while Lithium reduces Bcl-2 and upregulates Bax, sparing cells and reducing sebum.

Lrp5-independent activation of Wnt signaling by lithium chloride increases bone formation and bone mass in mice

PNAS | November 29, 2005 | vol. 102 | no. 48 | 17406-17411

Further, a highly negative modulator of the Wnt pathway and hair follicle health, Dickkopf-1 is suppressed by Lithium. Dickkopf-1 which
is initially signalled by DHT, sends an apoptoic cascade (programmed cell death) to hair follicles.

 

[michael barry]

One thing that worries me a bit is that on both of those pictures it looks like it was body hair that was growing instead of real terminal scalp hair.

Ive contemplated that myself. In the mice experiments, the "follica" hair cycled normally along with the other mouse fur.....................I "hope" it makes hair at least like the area that the wound was inducted by being made by the same cell lines. It would be pretty dissapointing if it made hair that was like chest hair. The hair was dark and all that jazz on both cases and that is encouraging in itself.


My big hope for follica is that it could make hair back in the donor area after a FUE transplant----effectively putting more hair on the scalp and increasing donor supply greatly.


We will see...........................I sure am glad this is being tested at Harvard. They are just going to abrade and watch the first set of guys---nothing else.

 

[goata007]

One thing that worries me a bit is that on both of those pictures it looks like it was body hair that was growing instead of real terminal scalp hair.

I think those were baby terminal hairs(very soft & silky), like the hair on a baby's head are and then around childhood the hair transform to thick terminal hair. The regrowth in the picture was 2-3 months after the guy got on gefitinib so the hair probably were going through the initial stages of growth just like any baby's hair. If the poor guy hadn't died, we could have requested new pictures.

 

[jakeb]

It would fall under off-label use, where a doctor can basically make up his or her own mind to use whatever drug(s) they have available to them to treat whatever ailment they see fit. This applies to any and all drugs that are FDA approved for *anything.* Now if the makers of Getfitinib wanted to legally sell their drug as a topical for hairloss then yes, they would have to go through years of trials and testing for safety and efficiency etc. in order to do that.

Or if Follica wanted to include it in their "kit", which they have patented.

 

[Matt27]

It would fall under off-label use, where a doctor can basically make up his or her own mind to use whatever drug(s) they have available to them to treat whatever ailment they see fit. This applies to any and all drugs that are FDA approved for *anything.* Now if the makers of Getfitinib wanted to legally sell their drug as a topical for hairloss then yes, they would have to go through years of trials and testing for safety and efficiency etc. in order to do that.

Or if Follica wanted to include it in their "kit", which they have patented.

Their kit will likely be sold and marketed as a "cosmetic procedure" to "promote healthy hair growth" etc. with no guarantees or promises, so I don't see any need or reason to conduct prolonged clinical trials. Again, there's nothing new here so I doubt they're going to seek FDA approval for their procedure just so they can advertise it regrows hair when they will likely have hundreds of photo's showing such.

And even if they *do* decide to seek FDA approval to market the procedure for hair loss, they can conduct the trials at the same time they're selling their kits/procedure, just like with laser hair removal products. There's nothing to stop them, no current legal roadblocks. The FDA would have to come out and specifically stop or ban the procedure for some reason, which is usually reserved for instances where there's a significant health threat.

 

[harold]

Someone posted over on HLH that Follica is looking for volunteers to test and monitor dermabrasian on bald scalp in humans. Here's the link:

http://www.hairlosshelp.com/forums/mess ... adid=80161

Hmm... Thats interesting, though i don’t know if its good news and bad news....

In no way is any of that advertising for volunteers related to Follica from the links...

But the guy on the other hair forum does state that it was follica who sent him the info in the email. So they are using a 3rd party - in this case a medical school called Hardvard to promote it for them and take the heat off the situation. Though it must be said, if its just mastering the dermabrasion then our realistic hopes have taken a backward step. surely they have input from the worlds most advance dermatologists on this, i would of thought this part of the process is relatively simple. I though follica would be more worried about finding the best and most optimum formula to conjure up out of all the medical ingredient drugs that is on their lab table.

Heres what I wrote at hairlosshelp about this:

Quote

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Originally posted by: Grommit
Don't get too excited there. I called to enter the trial and it has NOTHING to do with treatment. All they are doing is dermabrading very small sections of bald scalp and monitoring it microscopically for about 2 months. This trial, as stated, will not treat baldness and is not a "trial" but a research study. I am very afraid that if it takes them a whole year to set up a trial to see how dermabrasion affects skin (something they should already know) that it will be a LONG time before they actually get to the real clinical trials that involve compounds. Please someone with real knowledge of clinical trials tell me I'm wrong.
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I dont think it is so much to see how dermabrasion effects skin as to see how it effects bald skin vs normal skin. ie is there a difference in the rate/way it heals etc that might be relevant to the follica method as it works in the places we are interested in. Worst case scenario - early results indicate that it doesnt work very well in/at all in balding skin and they are trying to figure out why. Thats not a death knell for the Follica method though and if thats the case then we/they could learn a hell of alot of fundamental things about baldness and the resistance to regrowth from this.

Or as Moomin said they may be looking to see what is the optimal depth or the least ammount of damage possible to inflict that will induce the stage they are after. At any rate I dont think its disasterous news. It could well be happening in tandem with other trials.
hh

 

[harold]

While gefitinib has wowed people around the forums due to those pics of that guy and the hairy nose there is no reason to believe that it will have any particular pride of place over any other drug that inhibits EGFR. Efficacy, safety and possibly price and legal status will be determinants.

As for DMSO and wnt - I'm not convinced.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 May 13;100(10):5834-9. Epub 2003 Apr 28. Links
A Wnt- and beta -catenin-dependent pathway for mammalian cardiac myogenesis.Nakamura T, Sano M, Songyang Z, Schneider MD.
Center for Cardiovascular Development and Department of Biochemistry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.

Acquisition of a cardiac fate by embryonic mesodermal cells is a fundamental step in heart formation. Heart development in frogs and avians requires positive signals from adjacent endoderm, including bone morphogenic proteins, and is antagonized by a second secreted signal, Wnt proteins, from neural tube. By contrast, mechanisms of mesodermal commitment to create heart muscle in mammals are largely unknown. In addition, Wnt-dependent signals can involve either a canonical beta-catenin pathway or other, alternative mediators. Here, we tested the involvement of Wnts and beta-catenin in mammalian cardiac myogenesis by using a pluripotent mouse cell line (P19CL6) that recapitulates early steps for cardiac specification. In this system, early and late cardiac genes are up-regulated by 1% DMSO, and spontaneous beating occurs. Notably, Wnt3A and Wnt8A were induced days before even the earliest cardiogenic transcription factors. DMSO induced biochemical mediators of Wnt signaling (decreased phosphorylation and increased levels of beta-catenin), which were suppressed by Frizzled-8Fc, a soluble Wnt antagonist. DMSO provoked T cell factor-dependent transcriptional activity; thus, induction of Wnt proteins by DMSO was functionally coupled. Frizzled-8Fc inhibited the induction of cardiogenic transcription factors, cardiogenic growth factors, and sarcomeric myosin heavy chains. Likewise, differentiation was blocked by constitutively active glycogen synthase kinase 3beta, an intracellular inhibitor of the Wntbeta-catenin pathway. Conversely, lithium chloride, which inhibits glycogen synthase kinase 3beta, and Wnt3A-conditioned medium up-regulated early cardiac markers and the proportion of differentiated cells. Thus, Wntbeta-catenin signaling is activated at the inception of mammalian cardiac myogenesis and is indispensable for cardiac differentiation, at least in this pluripotent model system.

There are a few other papers which mention this about DMSO but the effect is only discussed in terms of cardiac cells and their progenitor stem cell lines. I dont know if it would upregulate wnt signalling in human skin. It might but I'm not confident. If so it is an interesting link because yeah - msm has been talked about anecdotally for years for its hair growth inducing properties.
hh

 

[harold]

OK I had alook at that full lidocaine study. It implies that the EGFR inhibiting properties of lidocaine are responsible for the delay in re-epithelialization but that tey dont rule out other factors casuing the delay in wound healing.
"The inhibitory effect of lidocaine on EGFR might not be a single cause of the halt in cell proliferation. Other mechanisms, which induce apoptosis or necrosis in cultured HCECs, might also be causes of the effect of high-concentration (4 and 40 mM) lidocaine on HCEC proliferation."

It seems that high enough concentrations of lidocaine for long enough periods of time have been shown to cause cell death in other tissues.

28. Friederich P, Schmitz TP: Lidocaine-induced cell death in a human model of neuronal apoptosis. Eur J Anaesthesiol 2002; 19:564–70 Bibliographic Links Library Holdings [Context Link]

29. Boselli E, Duflo F, Debon R, Allaouchiche B, Chassard D, Thomas L, Portoukalian J: The induction of apoptosis by local anesthetics: A comparison between lidocaine and ropivacaine. Anesth Analg 2003; 96:755–6 Ovid Full Text Bibliographic Links Library Holdings [Context Link]

 

[first]

While gefitinib has wowed people around the forums due to those pics of that guy and the hairy nose there is no reason to believe that it will have any particular pride of place over any other drug that inhibits EGFR. Efficacy, safety and possibly price and legal status will be determinants.

As for DMSO and wnt - I'm not convinced.

[..]

There are a few other papers which mention this about DMSO but the effect is only discussed in terms of cardiac cells and their progenitor stem cell lines. I dont know if it would upregulate wnt signalling in human skin. It might but I'm not confident. If so it is an interesting link because yeah - msm has been talked about anecdotally for years for its hair growth inducing properties.
hh

I am not convinced about DMSO and wnt either but you have to use something as a carrier and DMSO is super effective in that regard and it may have a positive effect in itself, so the choice is quite easy.

 

[Orin]

As a semi-side note; do any of you know a site where you can buy lithium chloride from? I only know of one, and it does not sell to anyone outside the US.

It's seems a surprisingly hard chemical to get your hand on; unless you give in to shady-looking asian pages. I was thinking of trying it instead of orotate. Maybe it will be more effective, who knows. Appreciate any help.

 

[ThunderTurd]

Seems like some of you started experimenting in March with the "do it yourself" follica, 4 months ago. Has anyone who is trying this seen anything substantial in completely bald scalp yet? I was under the impression that dermabrasion alone would create a few new hairs, so some people should be seeing that by now would they not? A guy on another forum stated he saw sprouts in 10 days. Not sure what to believe anymore

 

[jakeb]

Their kit will likely be sold and marketed as a "cosmetic procedure" to "promote healthy hair growth" etc. with no guarantees or promises, so I don't see any need or reason to conduct prolonged clinical trials. Again, there's nothing new here so I doubt they're going to seek FDA approval for their procedure just so they can advertise it regrows hair when they will likely have hundreds of photo's showing such.

If they sell Gefinitib for any other reason other than lung cancer... even if they say "take it for kicks, it won't do a thing", that's still an FDA trial. Once a compound is listed as a drug, it's a drug. It's too late to call Gefinitib a cosmetic agent.

The only way I could see it working is if they marketed the kit without Gefinitib and included instructions suggesting doctors to administer Gefinitib (off label) on their own, which would be legal.

 

[Moomin]

Hi Orin

I can't remember where you said you are based so whether or not these companies ship to your address I cannot say for certain but I know they ship to the UK

http://www.labdepotinc.com/p-19096-lith ... .php?c=505

http://www.colonialscientific.com/OScat ... 0346_66360

http://www.artchemicals.com/Lithium-Chl ... 8C603.aspx

I'm sure there are others. The first 2 look quite reputable, the third one looks over priced in my opinion.

 

[Moomin]

By the way, for those of you interested in using DMSO as a solvent and are thinking of purchasing it I would recommend a quick glance at this site:

http://www.dmso-use.com/dmso_bz_solution.html

You can ignore the majoirty of it, for our purposes, but it does give some useful info on DMSO storage/transportation, how to handle DMSO when applying it, and pure versus industrial grade DMSO. I've heard all of this info before but just haven't seen it all in one source unlike in this case.

Also for those of you thinking of devising a method utilising DMSO as a solvent and an acid such as TCA acid (for wounding purposes) , you should look into this further as DMSO is extrememly volatile upon contact with acids and TCA was mentioned in particular.

 

[first]

I ordered from http://www.cjchemical.net/products.html which was the cheapest I could find that would ship to Sweden (hence it will likely ship to the UK as well), I got the product swiftly without any issues.

 

[Moomin]

First, do you know whether your DMSO is medical grade and if so where did you get it from. I've been looking for a verfiabile reputable source of DMSO, and have only found one website so far.

 

[first]

Seems like some of you started experimenting in March with the "do it yourself" follica, 4 months ago. Has anyone who is trying this seen anything substantial in completely bald scalp yet? I was under the impression that dermabrasion alone would create a few new hairs, so some people should be seeing that by now would they not? A guy on another forum stated he saw sprouts in 10 days. Not sure what to believe anymore

Yes, dermabrasion in itself will cause hair growth but for it to be excellent, you will have to do it at least three times according to a study some pages back.

As people are still trying to find what works, it is doubtful that anyone has tried the same thing trice at the same spot.

 

[first]

First, do you know whether your DMSO is medical grade and if so where did you get it from. I've been looking for a verfiabile reputable source of DMSO, and have only found one website so far.

I'm using a pharmaceutical grade DMSO. Though it says "For industrial use only" as well on it, that is more likely just an extra precaution in case something goes wrong.

$9.99 from http://cgi.ebay.com/DMSO-99-9-DIMETHYL- ... dZViewItem

It was the cheapest undiluted I could find of the appropriate grade that would ship to Europe.

 

[Matt27]

Their kit will likely be sold and marketed as a "cosmetic procedure" to "promote healthy hair growth" etc. with no guarantees or promises, so I don't see any need or reason to conduct prolonged clinical trials. Again, there's nothing new here so I doubt they're going to seek FDA approval for their procedure just so they can advertise it regrows hair when they will likely have hundreds of photo's showing such.

If they sell Gefinitib for any other reason other than lung cancer... even if they say "take it for kicks, it won't do a thing", that's still an FDA trial. Once a compound is listed as a drug, it's a drug. It's too late to call Gefinitib a cosmetic agent.

The only way I could see it working is if they marketed the kit without Gefinitib and included instructions suggesting doctors to administer Gefinitib (off label) on their own, which would be legal.

You're entirely missing the point here. Follica will not be "selling Gefinitib" directly to consumers for hair loss at all. It's not going to be a consumer-direct drug like Finasteride or Minoxidil etc. The only people doing any direct consumer selling will be dermatology clinics. Even then you will not walk into a clinic and say, "I would like to purchase the Follica hair regrowth kit with Gefinitib." It will be like any other cosmetic procedure conducted at derm clinics, from hair restoration to nose jobs to laser hair removal etc. etc. You will pay for a “cosmetic procedure.â€￾ Follica will simply be a distributor/supplier of a custom kit of whatever they decide to distribute to the clinics.

You would be correct if Follica were looking to make a do-it-yourself home kit or similar product sold directly to consumers, but this is absolutely not what they are planning to do from the patent. Think of it like an independent drug distributor of Finasteride back in 1995. They purchase the drug in bulk from Merck and distribute it to clinics, doctors and pharmacies nationwide. Whether they distribute it for prostate cancer patients or hair regrowth is completely irrelevant to them AND the FDA since they're not selling anything directly to the public. They are selling an FDA approved drug to pharmacies and clinics. Follica will be just like that distributor, purchasing Gefinitib (if they do indeed choose to use this drug) in bulk from AstraZeneca and then including it in their kit while supplying them to derm clinics nationwide.

 

[jakeb]

It doesn't matter if the client is a doctor or a patient, you can't market a drug (even to doctors) for an indication it isn't approved for. If doctors want to take it upon themselves to buy the drug from the manufacturer and use it as they see fit, they can. If Follica were to include Gefinitib in their kit and simply not indicate what the drug was to be used for, I think they would be on very shaky legal ground. Providing doctors with instruction on how to use Gefinintib for hair loss would be considered marketing the drug for an unapproved indication.