Hair Loss Cure 2020

On this blog, I have in the past mentioned a few times how stem cell and other modern oftentimes untested medical procedures can take place rapidly in developing countries with lax to nonexistent (or easily pliable) regulations. Recently, we saw an example of this when Liz Parrish decided to travel to Colombia for her gene therapy treatment.

While all of us keep talking about how great Japan’s new regulations will be for the advancement of regenerative medicine and stem cell treatments, we have forgotten to keep an eye on Central and South America (the Caribbean region in particular) where things will likely move even faster.

The Bahamas and Peter Nygard

In recent years, the Bahamas has become a significant area of interest when it comes to stem cell treatments. I found the below somewhat cheesy Peter Nygard video from a few years ago interesting when I first saw it. I finally have a reason to include it (keep reading after the video to know why):

Watch this video on YouTube

The Bahamas, Okyanos and Favorable new Stem Cell Treatment Regulations

Okyanos Cell Therapy in the Bahamas is probably more reliable than Peter Nygard’s company. Besides having a regularly updated blog, in 2015 Okyanos became the first company in the Bahamas to receive regulatory approval from the National Stem Cell Ethics Committee (NSEC) to provide adult stem cell therapy. More here. Also see this latest piece on stem cell treatments in the Bahamas.

The Bahamas as a Secretive Tax Haven

This week’s biggest news story regarding “The Panama Papers” has also found a few cases of people with hidden funds in the Bahamas. In fact Investopedia’s list of top 10 Caribbean tax havens ranks the Bahamas as number 3. If you have the money, it seems like anything is possible in the Bahamas.

Guns for Hire in the Bahamas

In fact the Bahamas has an extremely high homicide rate considering that it is home to less than 400,000 people. Peter Nygard was even accused of hiring hitmen to get rid of a rival recently.

And?

So why have I devoted space to all of the above, part of which reads like a gossip magazine column? Well if you are a shady character or operate a shady company or deal with an untested and unproven technology that has no rigorous scientific backing, there is almost no place on earth where you would rather be than in the sunny Bahamas.

Lo and Behold

Lo and behold, today out of the blue came one of the most brazen announcements ever in the hair loss world (brazen because of the below quotes in blue). UK based Thorn Medical plc announced the launch of a joint venture company called “Tricogeneca Limited”, with IK Clinics (also of the UK). The new venture will provide stem cell treatments for baldness…. in the Bahamas of course. The founder and director of IK Clinics is someone named Dr. Irum Khan. On Thorn’s website, they discuss the Bahamas stem treatment approval for Thorn from March this year. Edit: Company site is now gone.

In the above linked press release, Thorn Medical’s accomplished CEO, the balding Jack Kaye, states: “We are delighted to establish this joint venture with Dr Khan. She has had great success in using stem cells for hair regrowth and we are keen to further promote this amazing breakthrough to make it available internationally, whilst carrying out further on-going development.”

In that same press release, Dr. Khan states: “Our initial focus has been on treating men, where we’ve had a 100% success rate and we’re now refining our techniques for curing alopecia in women, which, although still at an early stage, has so far shown similar success.”

Dr. Mahmood Bashir, who heads up Thorn Medical’s stem cell development and treatment efforts, said: “Although current techniques are still in their infancy, with only 10% of the new hair follicles cultured remaining alive, we can culture sufficient
quantities in the lab to provide a complete cure for male pattern baldness.”

And for the icing on the cake, I defer back to Jack Kaye: “With our recent stem cell licence in the Bahamas and this new venture, male pattern baldness will soon be a thing of the past!”

There you have it! After all these decades of numerous intelligent scientists working on a cure for hair loss, we are finally home sweet home. Four years earlier than I expected.

Dr. Irum Khan

Since Mr. Kaye stated that Dr. Irum Khan has had great success in using stem cells for hair regrowth, I went to her website. Not a single mention of stem cells anywhere whatsoever on her site. She offers scalp micro-pigmentation (SMP) treatments, hair transplants and medications, but no cell based treatments. Her website has a menu titled as “Blog 2”, and clicking on that takes you a to a haphazardly created page on thread facelifts. Clearly, her website would not be out of place in the Bahamas.

On a positive side, Dr. Khan does seem like a nice person.

Back to Thorn Medical

It seems like Thorn Medical is very soon going to raise capital via a £350 million IPO. According to another recent article, Mr. Kaye states that he expects the company’s value to double to £700 million by the end of the year. So he thinks that his company’s partner has forever cured hair loss per his earlier quote, and he values the benefit of such a cure at around £350 million max over the course of this year? My guess would be that it should be more like $35 billion, but I am no financial expert.

Back to the Bahamas

Joking and sarcasm aside, I guess it is great to have rogue nations such as the Bahamas where anyone can get away with anything when it comes to medical procedures (not so great for the initial scapegoat patients). If you have the funds and the willpower, I suspect that you can single handedly influence national regulations in countries throughout the Caribbean.

On April 1, a distinguished team of researchers from Japan published an important paper in the journal Science Advances describing how they successfully grew skin tissue in the lab (using reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem cells) which was then transplanted onto mice. The transplanted skin included fully functioning hair follicles with perfect growth and resting phase cycling (“no significant differences in the hair cycle periods were found between natural and bioengineered follicles“), sweat glands and sebaceous glands. Note that the original cells were also taken from mice (from their gums to be precise). Most importantly, there were no tumors or other life threatening disorders seen in the transplant recipient mice. It is still too early to tell whether such skin can act as real skin when it comes to its function of protecting the human body, cooling it and so forth.

It seems like this team was led by Dr. Ryoji Takagi from Tokyo University of Science and the renowned Dr. Takashi Tsuji from RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, with further collaboration with several other Japanese institutions. On a somewhat related note, the main initial work surrounding induced pluripotent stem cells (known as iPS cells or iPSCs) was undertaken by Japanese scientist Dr. Shinya Yamanaka in 2006, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this in 2012.

When I first read this story I was planning to include it in my next brief items of interest post around the middle of this month. I did not want to devote a whole blog post to this development (primarily because of the unclear human testing time frame projections involved — more on that later). However, this discovery soon started getting widespread global coverage. More importantly, 3 readers e-mailed me about it and probably another 10 posted about it in the comments to the last blog post! All the main hair loss forums have threads on this subject too. Here is some of the global coverage:

— BBC.

— Popular Mechanics.

— Daily Mail.

— Telegraph.

— Deutsche Welle.

— Mic.

— And from the horse’s own mouth.

The most debated issue on the hair loss forums has been the time frame before this is tested in humans. According to the BBC article “Researchers say this success will take 5-10 years to translate into humans.” According to the Mic article, “Optimistically, Tsuji said, they’re looking at sometime in the next 10 years.” According to the Popular Mechanics article, RIKEN researcher “Miho Ogawa estimates the first human trials will come within the next 10 years.”

I think that “within 10 years” could end up being in less than 5 years. I have three reasons for my optimism —

Japan’s rapidly aging and declining population will need regenerative stem cell therapies well before most other countries in the world.
As I have discussed on this blog many times in the past year or two, the Japanese government is nowadays extremely focused at speeding up human clinical trials in the regenerative medicine sector that will allow for short cuts such as skipping stage 3 clinical trials. I see no reason why they could also not speed up the process of moving from animal to human trials.
When it comes to funding, Japan is a rich nation that can afford to spend substantially on such research. Both via government funding and private funding (including foreign based private funding). On a related not, in my last brief items of interest post from March, I discussed the recent collaboration between RIKEN and private sector company Meiji Seika related to hair loss (albeit it seems their might be some incorrect info in that announcement). Also, in my second last brief items of interest post from February, I discussed another collaboration between RIKEN and Adjuvant Cosmetics.

Finally, it should be noted that more than for hair loss sufferers, this research is especially relevant to those with serious skin injuries and burns. Moreover, these methods could one day be used to create functioning organs that are suitable for transplantation. I recently read that once we have self-driving cars, traffic fatalities will decline to negligible levels, resulting in a major increase in already serious organ donor shortages.

Stem Cell Hair Research Arrives in the Bahamas