Is this real or just another fake news? CRISPR/Cas9 Therapy For Androgenic Alopecia: Moogene Medi
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This is not quite accurate. You can knockout the androgen receptor only in the scalp very easily. The problem is the safety of CRISPR/CAS9 isn't good enough to do this yet.
The big issue here in my opinion will be pricing, and it's probably the reason why we don't already have a "cure" close to the market in the form of a ASO. The existing SNA and ASO treatments on the market or near market are all priced at 6 figure dosing on a yearly basis, primarily covered by insurance if you have it in the USA. Why would anyone bother developing this for a non life threatening condition? No one will use it, the price incentives don't exist for development.
I have the same concerns about the Bayer/Hope Med antibody. There is no way that treatment will be affordable even if it moves mountains. It's yearly price is probably going to be akin to a hair transplant. Just look at winlevi in the USA, 600$ a tube without insurance.
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would men with high androgen receptor density throughout their bodies
look more masculine and
get more sides from finasteride?
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Indeed people take oral dutasteride and then they blame testosterone for causing hair loss, not realizing they still have significant amount of DHT in their scalps. Most people to this day have no idea that serum concentration is not the same as tissue. 2.5mg reduces scalp DHT levels by 80%.
If they're targeting the androgen receptor with their gene therapy, it won't work. If they manage to keep all the activity in the scalp, it may help a little, but it won't cure anything. They're better off using CRISPR to increase aromatase expression in the scalp, assuming they can target the scalp only and the effects won't wander toward other parts of the body. Should be interesting to see what unfolds, but I definitely wouldn't be first in line for this type of treatment.
It's targeting SRD5A2.
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If what they developed is only a temporary treatment, then it is totally meaningless, for both the company and the customers. No one is gonna pay $100,000 a year for a temporary gene therapy that needs to be taken every year for its effectiveness, they can barely make any money out of it because even the rich classes are better off with a regular hair transplant. They either set their goal in developing a way to permanently cure male pattern baldness with gene editings, or shutdown any gene editing researches related to hairloss completely if the outcome can't be permanent in the end.
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This is a very good point. Companies developing very expensive treatments targeting the 5-AR producing gene and the AR aren't doing it because it's going to be moderately effective. The only way they could sell such expensive treatments is if they completely prevent male pattern baldness, which they will. Eunuchs and men born without the 5-AR enzyme do not go bald, this is a fact in the literature. If someone takes a treatment that completely turns off the AR in their scalp that is no different from being castrated, and castration stops baldness dead in its tracks. It doesn't reverse it, but that's not the goal of the treatment. Simply being able to 100% prevent hair loss with no side effects would be worth a lot of money.
And this is why the pipeline is pathetic, there's no business incentives for companies to push the status quo unless it's a permanent and 100% effective treatment. Insurance won't cover this for 99% of people so the profits are non-existent in most use cases.
I always see people on this forum talking about how much money a company with an effective treatment would make, without realizing how false that is. Without insurance companies involved the profit of any drug is abysmal for the developer. If hairloss treatments were an insurable condition from a drug perspective, it'd have been cured from a clinical standpoint years ago.
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Lebron would pay 10 mil for a full head of hair without sides
You would find 1000, maybe 10.000 people paying a million for a full head of hair. Thats 1 billion already. Probably more. Cmon now
His point was moderately effective treatments like Replicel and Follicum or mildly effective treatments like Samumed. There's not that much profit in those. Just because there is profit doesn't mean its worthwhile to pursue. You would make money working a job for $15 an hour but why would you do that when you can go across the street and work for $30 an hour. It's the same thing with investors, why invest in something that has potential revenues of a few hundred million when you can invest in something that will make billions.
This is pure nonsense man, and not even close to true. Are their people who would pay 10 mil for a teenage level of density and hair? Sure. Is it enough for a drug company to be able to convince investors to invest? No.
A billion dollars is also absolutely nothing to a big pharma company, they want recurring revenue and high number of annual users. Pharma companies don't even care to try and develop a slightly improved competitor to finasteride, a drug that brings in 500m+ annually around the globe and has done so for 20+ years. You think a billion dollars is justification to develop anything at all?
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stemson initially will be for high-quality consumers, this means for rich, for average joe it is at least 10 years away
Yeah, but the whole reason their business model will make sense is because it will be available to more average people down the line once they've scaled anyways. Just look at Tsuji who isn't planning to have it available to regular people. The guy can't/hasn't got investors.
If that's the case, then it should work very well, assuming that they're able to semi-permanently alter 5AR expression only in the scalp. If they coupled this with increasing aromatase expression in the scalp, not only would it solve hair loss, you would have better hair than your juvenile state. Without altering aromatase expression, there's no guarantee that it will work for all men and it won't work at all for most women. Low aromatase expression and the presence of 5AR is what causes hair loss because they both lead to insufficient estrogenic activity in the scalp. Having both low aromatase expression and high 5AR expression simultaneously makes hair loss far more aggressive.
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I wish I could knock off all ARs from every follicle on my scalp and transplant them to my beard and chest, that way my sideburns will finally get connected to my chin and the bald spots will filled in, and I will no longer need to be awkward about having an completed hairless chest when I go to gym.All those androgen receptors happened to be in the wrong place in my scalpthey could have been much more useful somewhere else...
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“However, systemic distribution of
genetic elements has been reported to exhibit severe side effects due to
non-target organs being unnecessarily affected.”
Yeah, not yet ready it seems
Another 5 years
genetic elements has been reported to exhibit severe side effects due to
non-target organs being unnecessarily affected.”
Yeah, not yet ready it seems
Another 5 years
Behold, I introduce the new solution in Gene Editing Therapy using CRISPR called: "CRISPRoff" and "CRISPRon"
In a paper published April 9, 2021, in the journal Cell, researchers at UC San Francisco and the Whitehead Institute describe a novel CRISPR-based tool called “CRISPRoff,” which allows scientists to switch off almost any gene in human cells without making a single edit to the genetic code. The researchers also show that once a gene is switched off, it remains inert in the cell’s descendants for hundreds of generations, unless it is switched back on with a complementary tool called CRISPRon, also described in the paper.
Because the epigenome plays a central role in many diseases, from viral infection to cancer, CRISPRoff technology may one day lead to powerful epigenetic therapies. And since this approach doesn’t involve any DNA edits, it’s likely to be safer than conventional CRISPR therapeutics, which have been known to cause unwanted and potentially harmful changes to the genome.
www.ucsf.edu
In a paper published April 9, 2021, in the journal Cell, researchers at UC San Francisco and the Whitehead Institute describe a novel CRISPR-based tool called “CRISPRoff,” which allows scientists to switch off almost any gene in human cells without making a single edit to the genetic code. The researchers also show that once a gene is switched off, it remains inert in the cell’s descendants for hundreds of generations, unless it is switched back on with a complementary tool called CRISPRon, also described in the paper.
Because the epigenome plays a central role in many diseases, from viral infection to cancer, CRISPRoff technology may one day lead to powerful epigenetic therapies. And since this approach doesn’t involve any DNA edits, it’s likely to be safer than conventional CRISPR therapeutics, which have been known to cause unwanted and potentially harmful changes to the genome.
New CRISPR Technology Offers Unrivaled Control of Epigenetic Inheritance
Scientists have figured out how to modify CRISPR’s basic architecture to extend its reach beyond the genome and into what’s known as the epigenome.