While I was hoping to see more news on Twitter about the recently ended AHRS meeting in Orlando that I discussed in my last post, coverage has been sorely lacking.
In contrast, the European Hair Research Society’s 18th Annual Meeting in Italy is getting significantly more coverage. This conference only just started today, and will end on May 20th. So much more news is expected from there over the next several days.
Some highlights so far:
Dr. Ramon Grimalt from Spain posted the below interesting photo from a presentation by Dr. Yuliya Ovcharenko on Latanaprost and androgenetic alopecia (AGA). Note that Latanoprost is very closely related to Bimatoprost, which I have covered before. Both are prostamide F2α analogs.
One of the less desirable aspects about writing this blog is learning new acronyms or alphanumeric product names virtually every week. Half way into this month, my street cred has already been enhanced by “SFRP1”, “WAY-316606” and “HSC660”. Today come “AHRS” and “IID”.
AHRS 2018
Recently, I learnt that the American Hair Research Summit (AHRS) is holding its first conference from May 14-16, 2018 in Orlando, Florida at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort. Having covered numerous US and global hair loss conferences on this blog in the past, I did not recall having ever heard of the “AHRS”. It seems like this is the first ever conference being held by this newly formed association.
“The American Hair Research Society (AHRS) is the former North American Hair Research Society (NAHRS). Because of the great interest and contributions in hair research from colleagues in Central and South America, the “NAHRS” has expanded to “AHRS”.
The AHRS has manged to get an excellent list of speakers and presenters at its first ever summit. Some points of interest:
For a majority of us, the most interesting presentations are under the session titled as “Stem Cells, Hair Follicle Neogenesis & Regenerative Medicine”.
A number of you posted various links in relation to Aclaris Therapeutics’ press release about this conference. I removed all of them because I did not want that discussion to take place in the comments to my prior posts. The key sentence in this latest Aclaris press release is: “Current efforts to expand the range of diseases that could be targeted with JAK inhibitors will be discussed with emphasis on hair disorders, including alopecia areata and androgenetic alopecia.”
The Aclaris presenter Dr. Paul Changelian is an extremely respected researcher when it comes to JAK inhibitors. Especially Tofacitinib.
Aclaris and Samumed are both Silver level sponsors of this event.
Update: One of my inside sources e-mailed me today and said that there was some excitement about the results presented by Cassiopeia in relation to Breezula. Before anyone gets too excited, remember that Breezula is just a topical anti-androgen and unlikely to cause totally balding regions of the scalp to regain their past glory. Nevertheless, a good maintenance treatment in itself would be very welcome.
Dr. George Cotsarelis chairs an important session titled “PRP: Hope or Hype?”. A number of other presentations on PRP are also worth tracking.
Also a number of presentations on the similarly controversial laser and hair growth subject in the session titled “Photobiomodulation, Thermal and Light Therapies”.
The women continue to take over. The four co-chairs:
Dr. ChristianoDr. HordinskyDr. BergfeldDr. Tosti
IID 2018
Interestingly, the International Investigative Dermatology (IID) 2018 Meeting is also being held at the exact same Rosen Shingle Creek Resort location in Orlando from May 16-19, 2018. I am not too impressed with some parts of the IID 2018 website, but Aclaris is making several interesting presentations at this event.
In the first of those links, one of the abstracts is titled:
“Efficacy of topical tofacitinib in promoting hair growth in non-scarring alopecia“, and the author is from Thailand. Usually, the JAK inhibitor related studies are authored by US based scientists, so this is a nice change.
Non-scarring alopecia includes androgenetic alopecia, so I looked around and found this paper by the same author. Interesting that so much varied research over the years has found VEGF to be so important for hair growth.
Also of note is the fact that so many of the Aclaris presentations entail tofacitinib. We are still not 100% sure as to which of the various “-tinib” JAK inhibitors and their combinations the company is modifying and using in its much anticipated covalently bound topical JAK inhibitor product for treating androgenetic alopecia.
However, it looks like a certainty that some variation of tofacitinib will be a major component of the final product.
