Category Archives: Hair Cloning

HairClone to Offer Cell Expansion Service by 2025

HairClone Follicle Banking
HairClone Hair Follicle Banking.

I first covered UK based HairClone in 2016 in this very post. The original article is at the very bottom. Later in 2016, I interviewed the company’s accomplished CEO Dr. Paul Kemp several times. Also see his 2023 e-mail to me midway through this post.

Note that Mr. Kemp was previously CEO of Intercytex and has decades of experience in the regenerative medicine and hair space. I wrote another post on HairClone’s hair follicle banking service in 2019 and updated it in 2021. Thereafter, I have been updating this post again instead of creating new ones.

Most of us are no longer interested in updates about the follicle banking services. Instead, we eagerly await the day when HairClone finally begins its delayed dermal papilla cell expansion and implantation hair multiplication process. They now seem to prefer calling it hair rejuvenation (and hair rebuilding), which makes the company name even more of a misnomer. In any case, the last sentence in the below screenshot from their updated website is encouraging.

HairClone Hair Rejuvenation Procedure
HairClone’s hair rejuvenation procedure text from their updated website. Note the last sentence regarding faster use in UK clinics due to more favorable regulations.

HairClone Updates in 2024

HairClone Medical Director Dr. Bessam Farjo is featured in the March 2024 issue of Tatler Magazine. This publication is a leading guide for the UK beauty and cosmetics sector. Key quote:

“Although dermal papilla cell injections are not yet available, HairClone is close to clinical testing of this innovative approach.”

Reaffirmed in the article, HairClone has developed the technology to multiply human hair follicle dermal papilla cells from thousands into millions of cells. The company aims to inject these cells into thinning areas of the scalp in order to “rebuild and rejuvenate” miniaturising hairs. The follicle banking procedure entails the surgical removal of 100-120 hair follicles, which are then cryopreserved at -196ºC.

Also of interest, HairClone recently hired Willow Abbott as a research scientist. More information about the University of Birmingham graduate can be found on Linkedin.

HairClone in Guardian and New Scientist

Update: October 16, 2023

  • I missed this interesting update from HairClone in Guardian on October 1 (h/t “Ben”). Around 200 patients have banked their hair follicles with the company so far. Key quote:

“The company is in the process of establishing quality controls that will allow it to manufacture cells to clinical standards. At that point (the company is hoping that will be within the next 12-18 months) doctors will be able to offer it on an experimental basis to select patients.”

So the end of 2024 is a best case scenario. Based on past delays, I am changing the wording in the title of this post to 2025.

  • Also of note, HairClone was also covered in New Scientist Magazine on September 26, 2023. It is paywalled, but a summary can be read here. Perhaps they really are getting very serious about the time frame and hence all the publicity.

Update: March 9, 2023

Last week, one of our readers mentioned that HairClone had updated its website. I contacted Dr. Kemp and he confirmed that the refreshed site was launched on February 27th, 2023. And they also have a new logo. Moreover, the company plans to start its delayed cell expansion service no later than 2024.

HairClone New Logo
HairClone’s new logo, introduced in 2023.

HairClone to Start Cell Expansion Service by 2024

In my prior update from 2021, I mentioned HairClone’s goal of commencing its cell expansion service in 2022. However, this was delayed in the aftermath of Covid and fundraising related issues. Several days ago, Dr. Paul Kemp sent me an update and I am pasting his e-mail below:

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“Sorry for not replying sooner but I have just returned from annual leave. Yes we have freshened up the website and created a new logo that was inspired by our goal of rebuilding miniaturizing hair follicles. It was launched Feb 27th.

Our banking service continues to increase and we now have had 3 years of successive growth. We have also shown that our cryopreservation technology besides preserving the dermal papilla cells (that we will use in the treatment we are developing), is also able to cryopreserve the other cell types. This includes melanocytes, epithelial cells and bulge stem cells which could be used in other regenerative medicine therapies.

Though we are focusing solely on androgenic alopecia at this time, the follicles we are banking remain the property of the patients so this is a valuable way that patients could store considerable numbers of various cell types in a simple outpatient surgical procedure.

As always, we are re-investing revenues from banking to advance the therapy but are still limited by our ability to bring our technology to the clinic by our funding of the GMP manufacturing process needed to use the DP cells in the clinic.

We have developed an effective and reproducible system to increase the number of DP cells over 1,000 fold and have been able to carry out most of the technical transfer stages of this process to a licensed contract manufacturing facility. But we need additional funds in order to complete this technical transfer and enable the manufacturing facility to produce cells for clinical use.

We are looking to increase the number of Banking Associate Clinics that we work with both in the Americas as well as Europe and Asia and we are working to raise new equity funding in 2023. Our aim is to obtain the funds needed and start offering our cell expansion service no later than 2024.

Update: October 15, 2021

I always assumed that HairClone’s actual hair cloning or hair multiplication procedure was still years away. They have yet to even start human clinical trials. However, when it comes to autologous hair cell multiplication and transplantation, the UK has less stringent guidelines when it comes to testing in humans. Clinicians can offer unlicensed procedures prior to clinical trials. Japan also has some similar favorable regulations.

What a great surprise to then find this encouraging new below interview of Dr. Paul Kemp. He is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming ISHRS 2021 conference. His presentation will be titled:

“The Evolution of the Promise of Hair Cloning: How Hair Cell Cloning will Fit Into Your Practice.”

HairClone will offer its cell expansion hair multiplication services on a select basis in certain clinics in the UK starting in early 2022. Dr. Kemp has consulted with regulators and they are very supportive of this step. It is a way to ensure that future expensive and lengthy clinical trials have a much greater chance of success.

Also, Paul Kemp says the following at 15:50 in the below video:

“What we are planning to do early next year is offer a cell expansion service.”

September 8, 2016

During the past few months, there have been a few new companies entering the hair regeneration sector. Today, I learnt about yet another new entrant into the field named HairClone that warranted its own post. As yet, I do not consider HairClone anywhere near as important as the established entities such as the RIKEN/Kyocera/Tsuji partnership (Japan); or the Shiseido/Replicel partnership (Japan).

HairClone

I will briefly analyze HairClone via its positives and negatives:

Positives

  • The renowned and widely respected researcher Dr. Claire Higgins joined HairClone’s advisory board on August 30th, 2016.
  • HairClone will be hiring more scientific advisers besides Dr. Claire Higgins in the near future. Would be great if they tried to get Dr. Roland Lauster into the team.
  • A recent Tweet suggests monthly update meetings with PhD students.
  • HairClone has devised a unique and creative strategy to get funding that includes: crowdfunding; giving people who fund the company’s research preference when the actual treatment comes out; allowing investment in equity; offering leading hair transplant clinics around the world membership opportunities; and most interesting of all, hair follicle banking and storage.

Negatives

  • By far the biggest negative is that this is still way too early in the game and who knows when trials will commence, and whether the company will succeed with its dermal papilla focused cloning technology in the first place. Or even if they manage to get sufficient funding.
  • Related to the above, when Solomon interviewed Dr. Claire Higgins earlier this year, she generally sounded pessimistic about new treatments and said the following about cloning. Update: Solomon corrected me in the comments and said she was only talking about cell injections. But I think she sounded pessimistic about the hair cloning time-frame in the whole interview:

“I think the future (but it’s not in 4 years or 5 years away, it’s like in 20 years) is to promote direct conversion of fibroblasts into papillae. But something like this will take decades. We don’t know how to do that yet.”

I am hoping that Dr. Higgins will change her prediction to 10 years if her lab and research work gets significantly more resources as a result of HairClone. Thankfully, she said that she was not exactly sure about Dr. Tsuji’s work. Neither did she list Shiseido’s trials in Japan in her list of ongoing trial examples. So maybe she is just entirely focused on her own work and not following others too much?

Twenty years would be too big a gamble to invest in a company such as HairClone. I hope Dr. Bessam Farjo has other ideas and is hoping for much faster completion of clinical trials. And hopefully he is not only relying on Dr. Higgins’ dermal papilla related work.

Aderans and Intercytex: Hair Multiplication Failures

In a first for this blog, I am updating a post from ten years ago! Perhaps I should change the title and remove the word “failure”? I wonder how many of the original 15 commentators are still visiting this site?

Update: March 9, 2024

Stemson Therapeutics Aderans Licensing Agreement
Stemson Therapeutics (US) and Aderans (Japan) new licensing agreement. Screenshot from Nikkei Asia.

Stemson Therapeutics and Aderans Announce Licensing Deal

Earlier today, Stemson Therapeutics (US) and Aderans (Japan), the parent company of Bosley® and HAIRCLUB®, announced a partnership agreement (licensing deal).

This arrangement secures Stemson the exclusive global rights to research, develop and commercialize hair regeneration therapeutic products based on Aderans’ proprietary hair regeneration cell therapy technology. Note that Aderans and and Intercytex represented the only two major hopes for a hair loss cure throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. And then companies both folded and made me originally write this post a decade ago.

Stemson today likely represents the number one hope for a hair loss cure, although there are a number of other contenders in China, Japan, South Korea and the US. At least when it comes to much improved hair loss treatments

Getting back to Stemson, the company is developing a proprietary cell therapy for reversing hair loss that is based on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Per the press release, it now:

“Gains a complementary technology through this agreement. Stemson will resume Aderans’ Phase 2 clinical stage cell therapy hair regeneration program, integrate the technology into its existing hair loss cell therapy development pipeline, and provide multiple products for patients experiencing hair loss.”

What a great development. Aderans is back from the dead. It also seems like a backup plan for Stemson in case its main iPSC technology does not pan out. Moreover, Stemson seems to want to resume Phase 2 trials for Aderan’s hair regeneration technology. And Japan has more favorable regenerative medicine sector regulations when it comes to trials and in-clinic use.

Quote from Stemson CEO Geoff Hamilton:

“The synergies between the Aderans technology and Stemson’s in-house technology will help us accelerate timelines across our programs.”

Quote from Aderans CEO Yoshihiro Tsumura:

“We look forward to working with the Stemson team to enable their development efforts and to support the commercialization through our global network of clinics serving hair loss patients.”

Quote from the evergreen Ken Washenik (Chief Medical Officer of Bosley Medical and former CEO of Aderans Research Institute):

“Our pioneering work at the Aderans Research Institute to develop the first ever cell therapy solution for hair loss showed tremendous promise in clinical trials to treat early stage Androgenetic Alopecia in men and women. We believe Stemson, with their advanced expertise in hair follicle cell and tissue engineering, is ideally positioned to successfully complete development and commercialization of this exciting hair regeneration solution.”

November 25, 2014

Aderans and Intercytex: Hair Multiplication Failure

All the great news this year related to hair loss research, trials and potential cures has made people very optimistic. However, a lot of hair loss sufferers are becoming excessively passionate about a select few companies (especially Histogen and Replicel) or about the results from a select few clinical trials.

I therefore decided to write this post as a warning from past experiences of putting too much faith into any one or two entities. Something as simple as lack of sufficient funding despite successful stage 2 clinical trials can cause a company to stop pursuing highly promising products.

In the early-to-late 2000s, two companies named Aderans (Japan) and Intercytex (UK) caused tremendous excitement in all the online hair loss forums. Both were involved in groundbreaking research related to hair cloning and hair multiplication.

Moreover, Aderans’ research was led by the renowned Dr. Ken Washenik through the Aderans Research Institute. He made numerous presentations about their technology at various conferences. Below are two of those:

However, in 2013, Aderans decided to liquidate its research institute. Spencer Kobren had a segment about this on his usually weekly Bald Truth show. Also starring legendary hair loss sufferer and caller “Joe from Staten Island”.

Intercytex abandoned its dermal papilla cell culturing work in 2010 due to financial difficulties, despite positive results from phase 1 trials. According to the company’s website, in 2010 the Intercytex name and ICX-RHY were purchased by private investors and relaunched as Intercytex Ltd. ICX-RHY is a skin repair product.

As of 2014, Aderans’ research is focused on wigs and hair replacement. They purchased US-based hair restoration market leading companies Hair Club in 2013 and Bosley in 2001. Intercytex as a company is no longer in existence.