Declining Recent Interest in Histogen and Replicel
Several years ago, the two companies that hair loss sufferers cared about the most were Histogen and Replicel. Over time, news releases from Histogen slowed down and their published results were not especially impressive to the casual observer. While Replicel has remained highly active when it comes to news releases (probably more so than any other company ever involved in the hair loss cure world) and especially responsive on social media platforms, several delays in the company’s clinical trials have turned off many people. Moreover, just as with Histogen, it is not yet entirely clear as to how great Replicel’s results will be. It is assumed that once they use many injections, results will be significantly superior to what they have already shown in initial trials involving a limited number of injections. When it comes to Replicel, making things even less clear is the fact that Replicel’s much larger Japanese partner Shiseido is supplementing Replicel’s technology with its own technology. Below is an instructive chart showing Google Trends search results for keywords “Histogen” and “Replicel” since the start of 2008. Histogen is in red and Replicel is in blue, with the former causing the most excitement in 2010 and the latter in 2012.
Histogen Awakens from its Slumber
After not hearing much about Histogen in the past year, it was a pleasant surprise for me to learn that Histogen and its CEO Gail Naughton will be presenting at the upcoming 9th World Congress for Hair Research in Miami, Florida in November, 2015. I will be covering the details of this Congress in more detail in the coming weeks. See the news page on Histogen’s website that describes Dr. Naughton’s upcoming presentation.
Moreover, several months ago Histogen successfully garnered around $10 million in new financing that I mentioned in my brief items of interest post on this blog in July 2015. Also of interest, Histogen published a new promo video on youtube about 3 months ago that I only saw recently:
Replicel Keeps Presenting and Tweeting Regularly
It seems like Replicel has continued to come out with new presentations virtually every 2 months during the past several years. The latest from this month can be read here as well as seen in the video below. That video is from a presentation by Lee Buckler at this month’s Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM)’s annual “Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa” conference in San Diego, California. It is worth watching most of the video’s on ARM’s youtube channel. In the past, both Histogen and Replicel have presented at this annual conference, but this year it was only the latter.
Finally, for those who have questions related to Replicel, you should contact them directly via Twitter or Facebook as they are very responsive.
Last year, by far the biggest news of the year involved two likely cures for alopecia areata (AA) in humans. One was the arthritis drug tocafitinib and the other was the cancer drug ruxolitinib. Both drugs are classified as Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, and it is likely that many other drugs from this family will lead to similar results when it comes to hair regrowth. If you read my two main posts on this subject from last year (see here and here), it should be quite obvious how exciting the news was based on the large-scale global media coverage at the time (and of course the miraculous before and after human scalp photos instead of the usual mice photos).
Unfortunately, the vast majority of men (and many women too) who have hair loss suffer from androgenic alopecia, also known as male pattern baldness (MPB). There are probably 100 times as many people who suffer from MPB as there are who suffer from alopecia areata. So the big news of last year was only useful to 1 percent of hair loss sufferers, at least for the time being.
While many people (including the famous Dr. George Cotsarelis) dismissed the potential for JAK inhibitors to work on people who have androgenic alopecia, I was not so pessimistic. In my posts from last year, I mentioned that MPB probably also had an immune system attack/inflammatory component to it (and JAK inhibitors seem to cure alopecia areata via stopping the immune system from attacking the follicles). My theory was partly due to the fact that I and numerous others get a lot of itching and dandruff while losing hair (especially if not using shampoos such as Nizoral). I was therefore very surprised that Dr. Cotsarelis was dismissing these developments so fast. It should be noted that all of his decades of work and numerous patents could go down the drain if JAK inhibitors were to cure MPB in humans without any major side effects, since this is one rare area of hair loss research that Dr. Cotsarelis has never touched.
Strangely enough, the two teams that discovered the cure for alopecia areata last year were both based in New York. One was led by Dr. Angela Christiano and the other was led by Dr. Brett King. The latter has credited the former with being the pioneer in this work.
My biggest reason for keeping faith in the potential of JAK inhibitors to also work on people with male pattern hair loss was the Bald Truth interview that Spencer Kobren did with Dr. Brett King. In the video, Dr. King mentions that a topical formulation of Tofacitinib would likely be tested on patients with Androgenic Alopecia. He clearly felt that JAK inhibitors could perhaps work on MPB patients too. If I had to rate the chances of a hair loss cure for MPB arising from JAK inhibitors after that interview from last year, I would have said 3/10. After the below groundbreaking developments of today, I will raise my rating to 5/10. The one big issue is whether these drugs can regrow hair that has been lost for more than several years. Also an issue is long-term side effects, but so far the oral JAK inhibitors do not seem to have caused any deaths, and the topical version of those inhibitors will likely lead to even fewer side effects.
Today
Lo and behold, today Dr. Angela Christiano and her team published some findings (FULL TEXT AVAILABLE) that suggest a better than negligible chance of JAK inhibitors also working to treat androgenic alopecia. This time, they managed to grow hair on rats via a topical formulation of both Ruxolitinib and Tofacitinib. Below are the stunning pictures, albeit in mice this time (although it should be noted that they also grafted human hair onto the mice and achieved great results):
Some key quotes from Dr. Christiano per various articles from today:
“Male pattern hair loss follicles are stuck in the same state where these drugs seem to work.”
“What we’ve found is promising, though we haven’t yet shown it is effective for male pattern baldness.”
“JAK inhibitors seem to be among the very few number of compounds that produce hair growth very soon after their application.”
“But applying such drugs topically would be far safer.”
“Delivering it on the skin also seems to get more of the drug into the hair follicles.”
“Some topical agents induce tufts of hair here and there after a few weeks, but very few have such a powerful and rapid-acting effect.”
JAK Inhibitors Might Directly Affect Hair Follicles
The most interesting part of these experiments was that the mice grew more hair when the drug was applied topically to their skin versus when it was given to them to take internally. The research team thinks that this implies that JAK inhibitors might have a direct effect on hair follicles, in addition to the already known effect of inhibiting the immune attack. It should be noted that the precise terminology for this whole mechanism is “pharmacological inhibition of the JAK-STAT pathway/signaling”, with the STAT standing for “signal transducer and activator of transcription .”
JAK Inhibitors and Dermal Papilla Cells
I also found it interesting that the full published study has the following quote in the Abstract:
“We show that JAK inhibition regulates the activation of key hair follicle populations such as the hair germ and improves the inductivity of cultured human dermal papilla cells by controlling a molecular signature enriched in intact, fully inductive dermal papillae.”
A huge amount of hair loss research entails dermal papilla cells. I am not a scientist, but it seems like the above findings could also have ramifications for companies involved in 3D culturing of dermal papilla cells. In fact one of the co-authors of today’s groundbreaking paper is renowned hair loss researcher Dr. Claire Higgins, who has done quite a bit of work on 3D culturing of dermal papilla cells.
“Columbia University has filed patent applications relating to the discoveries reported in this paper, which are being commercialized through Vixen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., of which Dr. Christiano is a founder.”
This is interesting since some months ago I mentioned the fact that Dr. Christiano was supposedly starting a new company named “Rapunzel”. Perhaps she will have two companies devoted to curing hair loss: one for pharmaceuticals and one for work related to hair cloning and hair multiplication (i.e., cell culturing, stem cells etc…)?
I find this development encouraging since it makes more sense for Dr. Christiano to start a company devoted to this treatment only if she feels there could be at least some benefit to people suffering from MPB. Otherwise, she only has a market of 1 percent of balding people who have alopecia areata, and even that market would be split with other companies and doctors such as Dr. King that might make their own topical version of a different JAK inhibitor.
Videos
— The video from CBS does not embed very well in correct size, but is worth watching.
