Tsuji Riken Lab New Published Hair Cloning Study In 2021
Today, the laboratory of Dr. Tsuji at the Riken Institute has published a new research paper identifying key cells for the purpose of hair regeneration. It appears this knowledge will be useful in creating a functional hair cloning therapy.
Hair Follicle Epithelial Stem Cells
The new study by Tsuji et al. titled “Expansion and characterization of epithelial stem cells with potential for cyclical hair regeneration” was published in Nature Scientific Reports on February 10, 2021. According to the publication and various media reports, the team has identified a new culturing method using specific hair follicle stem cells which create long-cycling “cloned” hair follicles. In other words, the multiplied/cloned hair follicles will grow and release hair shafts over time just as native hair follicles do.
Image of a mouse hair follicle regrowing hair over a period of time. Credit: Riken
A bit of suspense built up before the publishing of this study due to a new Riken Twitter account which began tweeting about a “novel study” set to be released February 10th, and also that a press conference with “major Japanese media” had recently taken place. At first, the authenticity of this new Twitter account was in question until the official page of the Riken lab mentioned that the new Twitter account was indeed legitimate. Due to the grandiose-sounding Riken tweets many people got the impression that the we might finally be getting news of a Tsuji clinical trial taking place, but alas, not yet.
However, one Japanese media outlet reported interesting information and a positive quote from Dr. Tsuji worth mentioning here:
“According to the team, they are already ready for clinical studies to transplant into patients with alopecia to confirm their safety and efficacy. However, since the venture company (Organ Technologies) that was scheduled to be implemented stopped its business due to the influence of the new corona, etc., it started soliciting cooperating companies and donations from the 10th. Team leader Takashi Tsuji said, “I want to put it to practical use as soon as possible and improve the quality of life for people suffering from hair loss.“
In summation, the long awaited human clinical trial announcement from Dr. Tsuji has not happened yet, but it appears we have taken another step towards its fruition. All in all, it is definitely a great sign that Dr. Tsuji is still in fact working on his hair regeneration therapy and has plans to take it all the way. Please share your feedback in the comment section.
Posted in Hair Growth Treatment, Riken Institute, Takashi Tsuji
I wonder who may step to the plate and partner with Dr. Tsuji to get this thing rolling.
Admin what about stemson? what was in Hamilton’s last presentation?
If it becomes available I will share on this site al.
thanks Admin:)Is Stemson better solution than Tsuji?
Only God knows at this point 🙂
Admin but isn’t Stemson any better because it can offer an unlimited supply of new hair? Besides, the allogeneic approach will not be that you can choose hair type and color? e.g. Asian hair for someone of Slavic origin etc?
Tsuji could offer an unlimited supply for all intents and purposes as well, if it works. Allogeneic approach is likely a bit of a way’s ahead. We’re really just looking for a basic approach to work well.
the expectations were a little too high. But great news nonetheless. Think 2022 will be the year we are waiting for. Both Stemson, Tsuji and Tissuse should then start.
Good news, LFG.
Hi FT,
This is interesting news, but the annoying thing is the pre-clinical trial conducted back in 2019 used processes (including culturing methods) and technologies already established by Riken, Organ Technologies and Kyocera. Having passed the pre-clinical stage, they can’t use methods in the up coming clinical trials not used in that pre-clinical trial. So it will be interesting to see if they go with what they already have or go back to square one to implement the findings in this paper. I hope they go with what they have and use this to rectify the therapy if the trials don’t go as well as hoped or make it an even better therapy in the future after the current one has been established. But I have to say it is a little disheartening because the regeneration of hair from a follicle has been the big stumbling block with hair cloning and Tsuji and Riken have maintained since 2016 that this is in the bag. So to see this does put what has been established in to doubt. But as you said FT, Tsuji’s comments are encouraging. Shame Organ Tech has gone bust.
Good to see you commenting Welsh. Let’s hope a big partner announcement is coming soon.
Thank you admin for sharing this great news. Hope they truly mean it what they say, of making life better for people suffering from baldness and keep the price affordable. * If treatment works well in human.
Interesting that they have established a protocol to multiply the prerequisite cells whilst maintaining their inductivity.
I wonder what implications this could have for Hairclones work and proposed treatment.
Although follicle cloning is seen as the holy grail of baldness cures, hair regeneration/revitalisation of existing follicles is just as important as a therapy.
I’d rather not have to go all the way to nw6/7 before being ‘cured’, thats without even considering the price.
Great news though
As scientists learn more and more about smaller tasks like regrowing hair by finding ways to culture cells in mass passages I can’t help but think that ultimately this may all be leading to reversing the entire aging process. I mean if you consider that Tsuji is not doing what he’s doing in a vacuum and there are other scientists all over the world trying to do similar things with other small parts of the body. It makes it seem like we are closing in on the day when scientists say that they have found a way to return all human tissue to a younger point in time.
well atleast tsuji isn’t out of the game. but fustrating that he’s still not testing this on a human and i thought the cycling part was achieved like 5 years ago i remember they said that.
Woofy did Stemson achive the cycling part?
Al budny I’ll have to look and get back to you but I’m pretty sure they already achieved this or said they achieved.
#FollicleThought what has happened to Tissuse?
No news at the surface D1, surely they are working on things behind the scenes.
@FollicleThought will the finished treatment be injections of cells or a transplant like procedure?
Could be an injection-like procedure with the hair follicle germs inside of a plus sized needle. I don’t believe it will be just a bolus injection like the way PRP is done. These cells are specific to grow individual hair follicles as far as I can tell. More will be revealed in the future.
I don’t get why some people are disappointed with today’s announcement. A while back we weren’t certain if Tsuji’s research would even be continuing. Now we know that they’re ready for actual CLINICAL TRIALS in Humans! Riken is now in a similar position to Stemson where access to funding is the only thing that needs to be accomplished before trials. In a year or two there could realistically speaking there could be two hair cloning treatment in clinical trial, so we should stay cautiously optimistic.
Unrealistic expectations are the reason Twenti. Along with misinformation that is spread on the internet, opinions masquerading as facts…bad translations, agendas, self impotrance and good old fashioned trolling. Treatments, or cure if you will, like this are technological baby steps not giant leaps, it takes years not months.
We will see yoda.
Tsuji is locked and loaded ready to go they just to find a new partner not a big deal.
Save your money Woofy, you’ll be jumping on a plane to Japan in 2020 to have this done…oh wait, it’s 2021 already. 🙁
Lol ? yoda 2020 wasn’t 10 years ago but I understand what you mean.
You summed it up perfectly Yoda!
Nice perspective Twenti ?
I agree.
Now we need samumed to get great results out
Watch all the hair transplant doctors are going to say “oh this is 10 years away” yeah maybe in the United States because of the dumb FDA and researchers like Christiano. No wonder stemson is looking to the UK for trials, I would too. They’re bunch of negative clowns. They kill the positivity. And Dr McGrath from Texas said “hair cloning will never come out in our lifetime” preceded to than hype exosomes, just be quiet you obviously can’t see what’s in front of you.
The UK doesn’t have a fast track for clinical trials, we have medicinal specials.
Hi Admin, thank you for keep us updated. I would like to add something to this. The cure isn’t hair clonning. The cure is what makes hair clonning possible!!!!! The moment Tsuji or anyone else finds what pathway and/or protein signals the hair to grow, to rest, to die, to do whatever, is the cure. Today we have no idea what protein or how it signals and makes hair grow or fall. If anyone can grow hair in a lab, then it can be grown in our head. The missing piece is that signal that tells the hair follicule to change phase. That is what we don’t know. Maybe the wnt pathway is the key, maybe is pdge, and that is the struglle, we don’t need to clone hairs, we need to find how it grows, and then we can grow our own hair. This research is important for that, but the paradox is that when they find it, the hair clonning will be obsolete and unecessary. Do you think enough information will be relleased if they can clone it? It is exacly the same with other tissue clonning, specific protein targets a stem cell for differenciation, and no research has been able to tell what does what, without it there is no hair clonning, and with it, a therapy can be found, thus a cure. Am I right admin?
Are Stemson still looking for candidates in the UK? Does anyone have a link for that I can’t seem to find anything about it.
They’re not quite there yet, BearlyEagle. They will be working on pigs first.
Admin did Stemson start pig trial?
Hello admin,
Thanks for the article, very interesting and seems like a decent response from Riken. More than we have gotten from them in awhile. Glad they are still in the game.
Aside from this news, any word about the minoxidil booster or TH16?
Thanks Master V. Not at the moment, I will have those updates this coming week and the week after.
Hey Admin, just came across this and wanted to share.
http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/02/10/2173628/0/en/OliX-Pharmaceuticals-Announces-Results-from-Preclinical-Study-of-Hair-Loss-Therapeutic-Candidate.html
WTF is that. Looks incredible.
Great find, never heard of this company.
Thanks thinningontop, I was planning to share about this company soon, I guess they’re ready for exposure now.
Hi thinningontop,RNAi is a type of gene therapy another ,if the results are indeed true then great news
thinningontop nice find.
Great thanks Admin,
Pigs eh? Perhaps they may be interested in my wife? Although, doubtful as no one else seems to want her. 😉
LOL
Is it just me, or is this the most exciting news we’ve had in ages?
If I’ve understood correctly, it seems that Tsuji and co are ready for human trials, which will commence as soon as they secure funding?
How long, typically, does something like this go through all three stages? Are we looking at another five years?
If there are no more delays and no problems and they find a partner quickly this year then less then 5 years. I wish I had a crystal ball ? but that seems realistic. if everything goes well no later then 2024. That’s just my opinion
5 years in mouse years…or actually the opposite. 😉
They will win the Noble Prize for curing hair loss in mice. We have been waiting for 5 years for the past 20. I will be either dead or too bald to benefit from this therapy by the time they refine and get this technology to clinical efficacy in humans. In the mean time another break through paper will come out just to tell us that it will be on the market in the next 5 years. Hah!
Head up Joe.
Lots of nice momentum guys! Follow the money .. with all this Keeps and Himself bs , something big is bound to happen soon. I was close to calling Fortunis and BSing some private equity investment talk to get in on that webinar but didn’t follow through because I was busy. That being said, if you have at least 250k floating around ( and I’m sure there are millions of NW 4/5/6/7s) they will happily loop you in on wtf is actually going on with this hair regeneration scene.
Trust me lots is going to happen is next 2/3 years these guys see dollar signs.
Thx for everything again Admin.
Thank you John, I enjoyed your comment. ?
Tsuji Riken looking for new partners, when they had funding and government backup they couldn’t produce anything now they are saying they are ready it’s a very jock which I can’t laugh
Please learn how to spell, and complete a normal thought.
Let’s keep civil please.
Very good jock
From reading Riken’s latest tweets it appears that they had finished pre clinical safety trials in humans, and a application for a trial was accepted in June 2020. But Organ Tech ran out of funding; so progress came to a halt. Now they’re soliciting donations until they can find a partner company to bring in $4M in funding. I hope they are being proactive in looking for companies, or venture capitalists to raise money, and not just siting around until someone approaches them.
FT, I googled HairClone for the first time in a while and found some good news released today. Dr. Wasserbauer in California performed the first follicle banking service for a patient in 2020. Hairclone’s banking service is finally available in the United states.
https://www.prweb.com/releases/medical_breakthrough_set_to_disrupt_hair_restoration_industry/prweb17699365.htm
Do you get a free toaster when you open up a follicle banking account? 😉
Very cool Twenti, thanks.
Dr wasserbauer explaining the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8Q7_Y4pyg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U00sfiFS9Vw
Hey, I was just wondering- is this Riken/Tsuji stuff in theory growing completely new follicles, or does it regenerate old ones that have died/gone dormant too?
Growing new follicles from old follicles they’re cloning your donor hairs. Tsuji said they can use one follicle and turn that into 4,000. Yoda I hope you liked my joke 😉
Recent study shows 1 = 100 in terms of multiplication I’m pretty sure. Which is plenty.
Also for anyone interested, CK Biotech is seeking series B funding. No doubt they’ll secure it.
“CK Biotech Inc. is a series in which 5 institutions including Korea Development Bank, Yozma Group Korea, Knet Investment Partners, Synergy Ivy Investment, and Biohub participate in two years of attracting Series A 6 billion in December 2018. By attracting 13.55 billion B, it laid the foundation for clinical trials on non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), obesity, baldness, and wounds through tissue regeneration.
CK Biotech is a company that pursues the development of innovative (first-in-class) new drugs. It was started in October 2016 by Professor Kang-yeol Choi of Yonsei University as a faculty establishment, and by controlling the fundamental principles of stem cell activation regulation, problems are solved. Instead of using a lot of cell therapy, they are developing treatments that regenerate damaged tissues in intractable diseases.
In particular , skin anti-aging, baldness, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), using original technology that safely activates the Wnt/ b- catenin signaling pathway, which plays a key role in tissue regeneration in vivo . New drugs are being developed to fundamentally treat intractable diseases, such as metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes, which are unsatisfactory in medical demand, but lack of treatment or fundamental treatment development is limited.
CK Biotech’s diseases of interest are incurable diseases in which the protein CXXC5 is significantly increased in patient tissues, and thus the wint signaling system is suppressed and the tissue regeneration function is lost. By discovering and improving substances that inhibit protein-protein binding with a protein called Dishevelled, which is a mechanism for inhibiting winter signal transmission by CXXC5, over the past 10 years, it shows therapeutic effects by restoring the regeneration function of biological tissues lost in patients. It is being developed as an innovative regenerative treatment.
In the case of low-molecular compound candidates being developed, by activating stem cells in vivo to restore the patient’s tissue regeneration function (e.g., skin regeneration, liver protection and tissue regeneration in NASH, regeneration hair follicle formation), It was confirmed that it shows an excellent effect close to the fundamental treatment. Currently, preclinical trials have been completed for major candidates for development, and preparations for clinical trials are in progress. It aims to grow into a global renewable and innovative new drug company by completing phase 1 and 2 clinical trials for NASH and baldness treatment within the next few years.”
(http://ckbiotech.co.kr/news/?uid=32&mod=document&pageid=1)
Funny Woofboy, not as funny as Yoda, but funny! 🙂
What happens if you don’t have a good donor hair? All hairs have been affected by diffuse thinning? Then what? Does that mean you’re not a good candidate?
The Stemson approach does not appear to depend on cloning existing follicles. That said, it is a mystery to me how stem cells taken from blood (for example) will produce new follicles that are not also subject to diffuse thinning, or the more usual type of male pattern baldness. But with genetic modification proceeding a pace, I expect there will be a way to deal with that. But the bottom line is that hair cloning does seem to depend on having some hair follicles which are immune from balding, whereas Stemson is not cloning per se, so that is probably the better bet. (My hope is that Stemson will also prove to be somewhat more affordable than the eye watering sums that have been suggested for Tsuji’s procedure).
Yeah if you have dupa I don’t think you can get hair cloning unfortunately but I mean you could just get them to take a few hairs from your donor area use way 31660 or minoxidil on them and then clone them into 1,000s then Transplant them and you will probably have those hairs for 2 to 7 years I think. But then you’ll have to keep coming back to get cloned hair transplant. It would be very expensive to keep coming back unless you’re on Finasteride. But you’ll never run out of hair because of them banking your hair follicles.
There’s no Pont in using minoxidil or anything else on the follicles that are removed. They aren’t cloning the full follicle. They are taking individual cells and culturing them, so making the follicle bigger wouldn’t change anything. The reason they need a healthy follicle is so that they will get cells that are resistant to balding. Treating miniaturized follicles with minoxidil won’t accomplish that. They could still do the procedure with DUPA, and you would start out with healthy hairs, but they would miniaturize over time. Getting on dutasteride afterwards would help.
I mean the anagen phase can last 3 to 7 years
You know that website kickstarter? The Tsuji Team could create a kickstarter campaign for public donations. Just a thought
Brief update for those who haven’t seen it:
Riken has set up a donation page for Dr. Tsuji’s hair work https://www.riken.jp/support/solicited/#organ_regen the goal amount is said to be 500 million Yen which converts to about $4.7 million as of today.
Hey FT. You should post the donation link on the website so more people can see it.
Yes, I will do that Diffuse, though I will say I think Riken needs an industry partner moreso than donations from the crowd. Maybe a millionaire will help get things going for Tsuji.
Hey FT you know what they should have done with the RNAi injection test with the mice? Instead of comparing There RNAi injection treatment against flutamide they should have also compared it to oral estradiol or oral bicalutamide I think that would have been really interesting.
Pretty sure they know what they’re doing lol, also comparing it to oral estradiol wouldn’t make any sense in a scientific experiment. The drugs aren’t comparable in MoA.
I never said they didn’t. I feel like you’re talking down to me.
Dr. Tsuji forgot the word “RICH” in his statement, since his cure will cost 100-300k.
The correct version: “I want to put it to practical use as soon as possible and improve the quality of life for [RICH] people suffering from hair loss.“
hey @Follicle
I have stumble on a couple of interpretations of Tsuji’s update. As I got this hair cloning is just periodical, means it can last from 10 to 20 years and then you have to go back in order to get another hair cloning. Is that so? I thought it’d be done once and then time to chill 😀
p.s. I am asking on behalf of my Vin Diesel brother who is non-Engish speaker
best regards
GG
I don’t think anyone really has the answer for that right now GG. It would not be a big deal whether the hairs needed to be restored every 15 years anyways.
Not a big deal Admin? when You pay 300k for it it wont be a big deal?:D are You serious?
Yes I’m serious. There is no price set in stone yet.
from another forum :”HLC2020: Is this a one-time treatment for patients, or a lifelong commitment requiring X number of visits per year?
Dr. Terskikh: Good question. Initial success is usually last for several years, but due to the ongoing loss the transplantation procedures is likely to be repeated every 5-10 years. That’s where we get the best edge. See above.””
and my question:
When he says follow up procedures every 5-10 years is he referring to the inevitable loss of your original hair or is he saying the hair they implant will also fall out??
so the cloned hair fall out?
What I can’t understand is this…
If unlimited donor hair is available, then an entire head of hair with full density can likely be achieved over time for anyone with N7 hair loss.
If Tsuji’s method actually shows so much promise and is at the stage for human trials, why is he publicly soliciting $5 million to do them?
The potential for this treatment a multi hundred billion dollar market worldwide. Venture Capitalists would (should) be lining up to fund this. $5 million is nothing to them.
Just doesn’t make sense.