Cytori Licensee Kerastem Tech Expands Phase II Trial Of Early Baldness

Cytori Licensee Kerastem Tech Expands Phase II Trial Of Early Baldness

January 21, 2016, 07:31:00 AM EDT By RTT News

Source: nasdaq.com 

Shutterstock photo

(RTTNews.com) - Cytori Therapeutics, Inc. ( CYTX ) Thursday said that its licensee Kerastem Technologies, LLC, has expanded STYLE, its US phase II clinical trial. Kerastem said it has added new trial sites in New York and New Jersey to complement the currently enrolling sites in Los Angeles and Miami. The trial in phase II is to investigate early stage female and male pattern hair loss or alopecia.

Marc Hedrick, president & CEO of Cytori said, "If this trial is successful, we believe the Kerastem/Cytori partnership could provide effective treatment for people dealing with hair loss and create a significant new revenue source for Cytori, creating value for our stockholders."

STYLE is a randomized, blinded, and controlled investigation of Kerastem it was approved to enroll up to 70 patients at up to eight centers within the United States.

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Re-seeding hairlines with stem cells

Re-seeding hairlines with stem cells

22 December 2015 Suzanne Howson
Source: rsc.org

Scientists in China and Canada have developed a way to treat hair loss using stem cells. The cells are enclosed within a cytokine-containing layer that circumvents the difficulties in regenerating new hair follicles on bald skin.

(click on image to enlarge) Hu's and Xing's teams coated the stem cells with serval
 polymer layers to both protect them and provide them with hair-inductive properties

Hair loss, or alopecia, is a common problem caused by aging, diseases and medicines. Although not life-threatening, the emotional effects of hair loss can be damaging. Currently, treatments include drugs and hair transplants, however these are expensive and regenerating new hair follicles after treatment remains challenging. Dermal papilla cells, a type of mesenchymal stem cell located in hair follicles, are responsible for hair-follicle morphogenesis and hair cycling. Although potentially useful for treating alopecia, they suffer from loss of function in vitro.

A team lead by Zhi-Qi Hu from the Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University, China, and Malcolm Xing from the University of Manitoba, Canada, has designed what Xing describes as ‘nutritious nano-clothing’. This creates a protective microenvironment for dermal papilla cells, and at the same time provides the cells with a source of fibroblast growth factor-2, an essential cytokine culture nutrient that enhances proliferation and hair-inductive properties.

The team used layer-by-layer self-assembly deposition to encapsulate the cells within an inner layer of gelatin, a middle layer of alginate loaded with fibroblast growth factor-2, and an outer layer of gelatin. Tests on nude mice showed that the implanted encapsulated cells caused abundant hair growth with the hair follicle organisation showing mature characteristics. The coating improved the intrinsic therapeutic effect of the stem cells by preserving the native extracellular matrix that the cell produces, and sustaining release of the cytokine. Xing recalls that the most challenging aspect of this work was ‘optimising the concentrations of the coated polymers and manufacturing conditions to make the cells happy and healthy’.

Oommen Varghese, an expert in regenerative medicine from Uppsala University in Sweden says: ‘This is fascinating science that has enormous potential for clinical translational of stem cell based regenerative medicine. Such a coating could also protect cells from innate immunity, thereby improving the in vivo survivability. This is a major challenge in stem cell based translational research.’ Xing is currently trying to move the technology from the bench to the bedside.

REFERENCES

B Lin et al, J. Mater. Chem. B, 2016, DOI: 10.1039/c5tb02265g

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Bald truth: plucking hair out can stimulate growth, study finds

Bald truth: plucking hair out can stimulate growth, study finds

Hannah Devlin, science correspndent

@hannahdev Thursday 9 April 2015 17.02 BST Last modified on Thursday 9 April 2015 17.03 BSTSource: theguardian.com  

Although it seems counterintuitive, tests indicate that plucked follicles ‘communicate’, causing an immune response that leads to regrowth

Could this discovery be used to tackle baldness and alopecia? 
Tests are at an early stage, but could provide a solution in the future. Photograph: Asger Carlsen/Getty Images

Baldness is often dreaded by men and there are few, if any, satisfactory options for reversing it. Now scientists have discovered a potential solution, after showing that plucking hair out could actually stimulate growth.

The counterintuitive discovery, in mice, demonstrates a previously unknown method for triggering hair regeneration. Although the work is at an early stage, the authors believe the same process could be helpful for tackling hair loss in men or people with alopecia.

Philip Murray, of Dundee University and a co-author, said the findings now need to be tested in people. “It would be a bit of a leap of faith to expect this to work in bald men without doing more experiments,” he said.

The study found that when hairs were plucked in a specific configuration, follicles in the skin were prompted to send out a “distress” signal that led to even more hairs growing back. Plucking our 200 hairs triggered the growth of up to 1,200 replacement hairs in the mice, the study found.

Tests showed that the plucked follicles signal distress by releasing inflammatory proteins, which cause immune cells to rush to the site. In turn, these send out signals to all neighbouring follicles indicating that it is time to grow more hair.

“We’ve made a discovery about how hair communicates when it’s distressed,” said Murray.

The study, published in the journal Cell, showed that the pattern in which the hair was plucked played an important role in the strength of the “distress” signalling process. The researchers tested this by plucking 200 hair follicles, one by one, in different configurations on the back of a mouse. When plucking the hairs in a low-density pattern from an area more than six millimetres across, no hairs regenerated. However, higher-density plucking from circular areas with diameters between three and five millimetres triggered the regeneration of between 450 and 1,300 hairs – and the regeneration sometimes spilled out beyond the plucked area.

The authors believe that hair follicles do not simply respond individually to being plucked, but also communicate between themselves - something called “quorum sensing” - and effectively make a group decision about the level of immune response that is necessary. In the case of widely spaced plucking, the follicles are too far apart to be able to signal collectively. However, when the damage is tightly packed a more extreme response is mounted, leading to much stronger hair regrowth.

A potential drawback in balding men might be that their hairs are already too sparsely spaced for the approach to be helpful.

“It is a good example of how basic research can lead to a work with potential translational value,” said Cheng-Ming Chuong, professor of pathology at the University of Southern California and lead author.

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Bioengineered Follicles Grow Hair On Bald Mice

Bioengineered Follicles Grow Hair On Bald Mice

Published: Saturday 21 April 2012 at 12am PST
Source: medicalnewstoday.com

In a proof of concept study for bioengineered organ replacement, researchers in Japan made hair follicles derived from adult stem cells interact with surrounding tissue and show normal hair cycles, when transplanted into the skin of bald mice.

Takashi Tsuji, a Professor in the Research Institute for Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, and Director of Organ Technologies Inc, led the team, who report their findings in an open access paper published in Nature Communications on 17 April.

The study is significant on two counts: first it used adult stem cells and not embryonic stem cells, and second, the bioengineered follicles were fully functional and integrated into surrounding tissue, something that has not been managed before.

Not only does the study raise hopes of a cure for baldness, the researchers say it also represents a significant advance toward the next generation of "organ replacement regenerative therapies" that will enable the replacement of organs damaged by disease, injury or aging.

The researchers bioengineered hair follicle germ cells, the cells that mature into cells that grow hair, from two other types of cell: adult epithelial stem cells and dermal papilla cells.

They implanted the bioengineered cells into the skin of hairless mice and showed that they went on to have normal hair cycles, where after dead hairs fell out, new ones took their place.

The cells also showed other signs of normal functioning, such as piloerection, where the hair "stands on end" as a result of contraction of tiny surrounding muscles.

The authors write that the bioengineered follicles showed these restored functions "through the rearrangement of follicular stem cells and their niches". This is important because the "niches", a loose term to describe the microenvironment of stem cells, are what regulate normal stem cell behavior: for instance, they decide when to wake up stem cells to mature into fully formed follicles.

As well as demonstrating normal functioning, the bioengineered hair follicles developed the correct structures and made the right connections with surrounding tissue, including the epidermis, arrector pili muscles (the ones that produce piloerection) and nerve fibers.

The authors write:

"... our findings indicate that it is possible to not only restore a hair follicle but also to re-establish successful connections with the recipient skin by intracutaneous transplantation of the bioengineered follicle germ."

In their discussion they conclude:

"These findings significantly advance the technological development of bioengineered hair follicle regenerative therapy", and make a substantial contribution that will "enable future regenerative therapy for hair loss caused by injury or by diseases such as alopecia and androgenic alopecia".

They call for further studies to find out how to optimize human hair follicle-derived stem cell sources for clinical applications, and for further investigations of stem cell niches, as these will contribute to the "development of hair regenerative therapy as a prominent class of organ replacement regenerative therapy in the future".

Written by Catharine PaddockPhD

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A pill to cure baldness?

A pill to cure baldness?

Researchers may have accidentally found an answer to one life's biggest mysteries: the elusive cure for baldness.

Elizabeth Cohen, CNN 

5:38 p.m. CDT June 20, 2014
Source: ksdk.com

Researchers may have accidentally found an answer to one life's biggest mysteries: the elusive cure for baldness. A man went from completely bald to a full head of hair, in just months, and all thanks to a little pill meant to treat arthritis.

But, how does it work? And could the treatment do the same for others?

Kyle Rhodes went from bald to having a thick, full head of hair.

"I've gotten a lot of comments about how great my hair is coming in and what a lovely color of hair it is. I find myself a lot of times just playing with it," said Rhodes.

What was the trick? No, not Rogaine or Propecia. They grow hair only on parts of the scalp. It was a pill, a drug called Xeljanz that's actually already on the market for arthritis.

Rhodes' doctor at Yale University decided to give it a try, and eight months later, viola! Rhodes, who's 25, started losing hair all over his body at age two because of an unusual form of alopecia.

"Neighborhood kids at school, just jokes, Rogaine comments. One thing I did get when I was completely bald is called a skinhead, which I found very offensive," said Rhodes.

But now, even his eyelashes and eyebrows are back.

Six and a half million people have a skin disease like Rhodes'. His doctor says the drug may one day help them, too.

But what about the tens of millions of men who've just gone bald as they've gotten older? The doctor doesn't think the drug will help them, but he does think it's worth doing a study to find out.

The drug can have serious side effects. Rhodes hasn't had any, and he's enjoying his new head of hair

"I've always wanted an '80s hockey mullet so maybe going towards that," said Rhodes.

Why would an arthritis drug help hair loss? The doctor thinks it's because arthritis and some forms of alopecia are related to the immune system.

The drug is not cheap. Without insurance it can cost an estimated $25,000 a year. Rhodes said his insurance pays for most of the cost.

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