This is cut from a post at hairsite from John the Revelator. JTR, as most of us call him, is probably the second most knowledgable poster concerning HM in all the forums behind a guy called James Bond.
He said "#38221, "RE: JTR"
In response to In response to 29
Mon Jul-10-06 06:01 PM by John The Revelator
I never said I thought HM works only by introducing new follicles.
I've always believed that it's MORE LIKELY that HM works PRIMARILY by generating new follicles, but also that there is a very real potential for stimulation of existing, miniaturized or miniaturizing follicles.
By contrast, apparently Dr. Gho claims (per JB) that his method of HM works primarily by stimulation of existing, male pattern baldness-affected follicles, not by generating new ones.
I don't think it's a 100% either/or thing, anyway. Just because HM generates new follicles, doesn't mean that some stimulation and strengthening of existing follicles is ruled out.
But you can only strengthen them to the degree that the donor follicles are strong. You can't create stronger follicles than the donor follicles, because the donor follicle cell lines pass on their genetic expression to the new follicles in the recipient site.
If your donor follicles are weak and thin, chances are that any resulting new follicles (or any stimulative effect) will also be pretty weak, and the HM hair will be no thicker than the donor hair."
The experiments that took vellus hairs from bald men and some donor hair from the same men, moved them to the backs of immuno-deficient mice, and thus seen the vellus hairs regenerate to be just as big as the donor hairs is an example of the fact that these hairs aren't really dead, but are being held back by (what most of us think) the immune system attack on them. In HM, donor area hair cells >might> inject their own cellular DNA into the papilla's of shrunken hair follicles. This would make a >percentage> of those hairs exhibit donor hair characteristics theoretcially. Its been bandied about quite a bit on the forums that perhaps a big round of HM injections to a man, before he starts to male pattern baldness, might keep him from going bald if this is true. Coen Gho thought this is where he was primarily having success in his manual follicular neo-genesis method. But, Gho's method, being manual and just cutting dermal papilla's in half and injectecting the top two-thirds into the frontal scalp, could only move about 500 hairs a session (and then you have to wait at least one year for the donor hairs to recover). It has not been commercially successful (very expensive, limited results).
We will see. JB thinks the potential is there for JTR to be right. Anyone wanting to know cloning can read their posts on the subject. They buy the medical journals where findings are published, JB has interviewed a few docs over the years (Gho, Cooley I think, couple of others) and spend alot of their personal time on that stuff. They are the best sources on this that Ive been able to find.
