Stemson is going to use minipigs in the next stage of their hair cloning research

[Joxy]

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging​

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.


iPS cells like this one are being studied by Japanese researchers for a myriad of healing and anti-aging benefits.

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It has been 15 years since Kyoto University Professor Shinya Yamanaka pioneered induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Much like fertilized eggs, iPS cells can transform into a variety of cells.
Remarkable developments continue, with research into applications for regenerative medicine and drug discovery, and the introduction of a “next generation type” with the potential to transform into a wider range of cells.
Recently, the possibility of applying iPS cell technology to improvements in the body’s capabilities and prevention of aging has emerged.

iPS cell research includes potential benefits for muscle diseases and anti-aging.

Enabling Production of Placental Cells ​

First introduced in 2006, iPS cells are created by introducing a special gene into cells taken from the skin or blood of an organism, and “initializing” them into a fertilized egg-like state that can change and grow into a variety of cells.
When an egg and sperm meet to form a fertilized egg, the cells that will become the placenta are formed inside. Then, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, the placenta, which supplies oxygen and blood from the mother to the fetus, is formed. The state of the iPS cells is similar to that of a fertilized egg after implantation. Therefore, up to now they were unable to form a placenta, which requires the state of a fertilized egg before implantation.
Recently, however, an initialization process has been devised for production of a next-generation type iPS cell that is more similar to the fertilized egg before implantation. A Kyoto University research team announced in April that they have succeeded ー for the first time in the world ー in producing cells that form the basis of the placenta using this technology.
If conditions such as infertility, thought to be caused by abnormalities in the placenta, can be duplicated using these next-generation cells, they could help scientists understand the cause of such conditions.
In addition, because these cells are considered to be equally suitable to changing into any type of cell, they are one step closer to “totipotency,” which further expands their range of potential applications.

Surgery using iPS cells is being carried out in Japan to determine how many heretofore untreatable diseases can benefit from iPS cell treatment.

Countering COVID-19​

A number of studies on clinical application in regenerative medicine, in which cells and tissues made from iPS cells are transplanted for treatment, are also underway.
Developments related to eye diseases have been quick. Since 2014, RIKEN and the Kobe City Eye Hospital have been transplanting retinal cells to patients with three different diseases. Osaka University has also conducted transplants of corneal cells.

RELATED:Osaka Researchers’ iPS Cells Transplant A Touchstone for Life-saving Regenerative Medicine

Other surgeries have been performed to transplant nerve cells into patients with Parkinson’s disease (Kyoto University), platelets into patients with aplastic anemia (Kyoto University), heart muscle cell sheets into patients with severe heart failure (Osaka University), and immune cells into patients with head cancers (Chiba University).
They are also helping to combat COVID-19. Kyoto University announced in April that it had discovered candidate treatment drugs using iPS cells. They administered 500 existing drugs to human iPS cells to determine whether or not they could prevent the invasion of a virus, one with a similar mechanism of infection to COVID-19, but safer. They found that a drug for osteoporosis and a hypoglycemic agent had promising effects.
The issue is cost. According to the iPS Cell Research Foundation of Kyoto University, which stores and supplies cells, it costs about ￥40 million JPY (about $370,000 USD) to produce iPS cells from the blood of one healthy person.
It then costs between ￥60 million and ￥100 million JPY ($550,000 to about $1 million USD) to transform these into various types of cells for transplantation into one person.
This high cost arises because work is done completely by hand and requires an enormous amount of time. The foundation is hurrying to automate and streamline the production process and hopes to reduce the cost of the entire process from creation to transformation to about ￥3 million JPY ($28,000 USD) by 2025.

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging | JAPAN Forward

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.

japan-forward.com

 

[werefckd]

Thanks for sharing those articles Joxy, they are in line with what the folks at Stemson are hinting their biggest challenges are right now.

Being able to automate the process of iPS cells differentiation is key, specially for them since they have to get the neural crest cells before the dp cells, doubling the complexity of it.

 

[scientist_0005]

these sums are absolutely insane

 

[froggy7]

very interesting how much Stemson will cost if they come to an end

 

[scientist_0005]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

 

[froggy7]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

it was one year ago....

 

[scientist_0005]

it was one year ago..

whats your problem?? do you want to chime in to tell us how its going to cost again? go ahead.

 

[froggy7]

whats your problem?? do you want to chime in to tell us how its going to cost again? go ahead.

a year ago they did not know maybe about the problems they have encountered in recent months, note that Geoff is more careful in his estimates, had they followed Alexey's schedule they would have started human trials.

 

[scientist_0005]

he also did not talk about the dht resistance issue

 

[trialAcc]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

This is from 2019/2020 though. Even here he says years away but what's changed after this video is that they realized that the idea of hair transplant surgeons preforming this is insane and will yield poor results. That's why they started working on machine learning to perfect it themselves.

 

[scientist_0005]

This is from 2019/2020 though. Even here he says years away but what's changed after this video is that they realized that the idea of hair transplant surgeons preforming this is insane and will yield poor results. That's why they started working on machine learning to perfect it themselves.

why is it insane and how would machine learning solve it? as i understand it they applied machine learning in form of computational biology to identify certain genes and molecules etc but not in getting it in the actual head

 

[werefckd]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

That video is very informative, it's from almost exactly one year ago

What have changed since then is that they raised an additional $15M of funding and doubled their research team.

What they are trying to accomplish is ultra ultra hard but they got their grips on it!

 

[froggy7]

That video is very informative, it's from almost exactly one year ago

What have changed since then is that they raised an additional $15M of funding and doubled their research team.

What they are trying to accomplish is ultra ultra hard but they got their grips on it!

where do you have data on doubling their team?

 

[trialAcc]

why is it insane and how would machine learning solve it? as i understand it they applied machine learning in form of computational biology to identify certain genes and molecules etc but not in getting it in the actual head

They're building ML models to actually do the transplanting by means of integrating robotics. A machine will be trained to map natural hair patterns and implant the synthetic scaffolds.

 

[Joxy]

The gold standard in cryopreservation is still conventional slow freezing of single cells or small aggregates in suspension, although major cell loss and limitation to non-specialised cell types in stem cell technology are known drawbacks. The requirement for rapidly available therapeutic and diagnostic cell types is increasing constantly. In the case of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) or their derivates, more sophisticated cryopreservation protocols are needed to address this demand. These should allow a preservation in their physiological, adherent state, an efficient re-cultivation and upscaling upon thawing towards high-throughput applications in cell therapies or disease modelling in drug discovery. Here, we present a novel vitrification-based method for adherent hiPSCs, designed for automated handling by microfluidic approaches and with ready-to-use potential e.g. in suspension-based bioreactors after thawing. Modifiable alginate microcarriers serve as a growth surface for adherent hiPSCs that were cultured in a suspension-based bioreactor and subsequently cryopreserved via droplet-based vitrification in comparison to conventional slow freezing. Soft (0.35%) versus stiff (0.65%) alginate microcarriers in concert with adhesion time variation have been examined. Findings revealed specific optimal conditions leading to an adhesion time and growth surface (matrix) elasticity dependent hypothesis on cryo-induced damaging regimes for adherent cell types. Deviations from the found optimum parameters give rise to membrane ruptures assessed via SEM and major cell loss after adherent vitrification. Applying the optimal conditions, droplet-based vitrification was superior to conventional slow freezing. A decreased microcarrier stiffness was found to outperform stiffer material regarding cell recovery, whereas the stemness characteristics of rewarmed hiPSCs were preserved.


Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), reprogrammed from somatic cells, have the potential of unlimited self-renewal and the capacity to differentiate to any cell type of the body [1,2]. Starting from healthy or diseased individuals as donors, hiPSCs serve as a starting point for patient- and disease-specific cells and thus take the field of regenerative medicine, developmental biology, and diagnostics to the next level [3]. This cutting-edge discovery has enabled disease-specific models for drug screening, e.g. amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [4], retinitis pigmentosa [5] or cardiomyopathies [6], and even curative cell-based therapies to be developed [7,8]. Prominent targets for the latter are opthalmological diseases, where hiPSC-derived retinal epithelial cell are developed as advanced therapy medical product (ATMP) to treat age-related macula degeneration [9]. A basic prerequisite for these broad fields of applications is the sufficient supply of hiPSCs and a robust logistic for hiPSCs and hiPSC-derived ATMPs. Current biotechnological approaches develop protocols and devices for large-scale expansion to secure the supply of undifferentiated hiPSCs [10]. Whereas conventional expansion strategies utilise standard adherent cultivation techniques in manual procedures, novel approaches implement suspension-based bioreactors with higher throughput in concert with the optimization of medium to biomass ratios leading to the possibility for automated on-line monitoring and sample manipulation [11]. Such bioreactors combine the benefits of large scale production with the option to either run the process in the well-known conventional two-dimensional cultivation routine using microcarriers as a growth surface [12] or as three dimensional cell cultures as an optimal starting point for subsequent differentiation processes [13]. However, little progress has been made towards reaching the goal of storing bulk quantities of viable and fully functional cells in an application-oriented manner. Whereas cryopreservation is still the only option to store viable biomaterial for unlimited time, the current cryotechnological infrastructure in biobanks is designed for keeping cell-stocks in relatively small aliquots (e.g. 1 ml cryovials) followed by expansion and cell manipulation routines at the recipient's site to finally achieve the desired cell state and format [14]. The conventional and most commonly used cryopreservation method for hiPSCs is a slow freezing protocol of single cells in suspension applying cooling rates of approx. −1 °C/min [15]. Despite the addition of various cryoprotective agents (CPAs), like 10% dimethyl sulfoxide (Me2SO), thawed hiPSCs show poor re-attachment and recovery rates [16]. Besides the damaging effects caused directly by the formation of ice crystals during freezing which indiscriminately affects any cell type, the sensitivity of hiPSCs to the necessary detachment and dissociation process using enzymatically active agents is a main reason for this reduced viability [17]. The use of Rho/Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor can support both the dissociation as well as the cryopreservation process by reducing the incidence of dissociation-induced cell death but has been reported to cause unwanted effects [18,19]. Although there are promising approaches to cryopreserving adherent cells by means of conventional slow freezing protocols [20,21,22], application-oriented routines for large-scale cryopreservation are missing especially for sensitive hiPSCs. A second cryopreservation regime, vitrification, enables the maintenance of cells in their adherent state, thus avoiding potentially harmful dissociation steps. With ultra-fast cooling rates and adjusted CPA concentrations within the sample, ice formation and thus damaging mechanisms like osmotic shock, water depletion and mechanical membrane ruptures are avoided [23]. The superiority of vitrification especially for tissue engineered products, has already been demonstrated for encapsulated bone marrow stem cells in alginate-fibrin-beads [24] as well as for adherent mesenchymal stem cells on alginate-beads [25]. However, up until now, vitrification approaches have required skilled handling and are only valid for small sample sizes, making it unsuitable for bulk storage [26,27]. Here we report a novel approach combining the advantages of alginate-based microcarriers with modifiable characteristics for cultivation of hiPSCs together with a vitrification approach. The process was designed for automation, allowing application-oriented large-scale cryopreservation towards ready-to-use storable hiPSCs in suspension-based bioreactors. In addition, the findings presented in this study lead to the hypothesis of an optimal adhesion time prior to cryopreservation dependent on cell type and matrix elasticity.

Droplet-based vitrification of adherent human induced pluripotent stem cells on alginate microcarrier influenced by adhesion time and matrix elasticity

The gold standard in cryopreservation is still conventional slow freezing of single cells or small aggregates in suspension, although major cell loss …

www.sciencedirect.com

 

[Joxy]

Omg the insane amount of money … i believe stemson solution might be very pricey and they find out how to automate it

It is still very new technology (iPSCs) and they are extremely expensive to produce them in labs.

 

[werefckd]

Presumably this is where they are getting their asses kicked at the moment

 

[werefckd]

This panel discussion will be very interesting

 

[werefckd]

I know I shouldn’t post this because you guys are going to run wild with this…

If you thought the imaginary tsuji treatment was expensive, how about this:

Getting one dose of clinical grade cells derived from iPSC currently costs ONE MILLION DOLLARS, lol

They expect the price to fall to $30K by 2025, which is a fraction of that but still a lot.

My guess is Stemson will likely subsidize their treatment in the beginning and run at a loss with the help of venture funding in order to scale. We will see, as long as the treatment works then anything else is possible

 

[surfer9]

They expect the price to fall to $30K by 2025, which is a fraction of that but still a lot.

Would it be a 1 time thing where a NW6 can get a full head of hair for the rest of his life at the cost of $30k?