“We have seen so many come in and say they have a solution. So is stem-cell technology going to cure baldness or become the next false hope? Hamilton, who was invited to give the keynote at this year’s Global Hair Loss Summit, says he tried to emphasize that the company still has plenty of research ahead of it. JIYOON LEE AND KARL KOEHLER, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL Tricky business When women lose hair, it’s often a more general thinning, but it’s no less a blow to self-image. About half of men undergo male-pattern baldness, some starting in their 20s. Cofounder and CEO Geoff Hamilton says his company is transplanting reprogrammed cells onto the skin of mice and pigs to test the technology.īoth Hamilton and Lujan think there is a substantial market. In addition to dNovo, a company called Stemson (its name is a portmanteau of “stem cell” and “Samson”) has raised $22.5 million from funders including from the drug company AbbVie. The concept startups are pursuing is to collect ordinary cells such as skin cells from patients and then convert these into hair-forming cells. Then, last November, a US company, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, said it might have cured a man’s type 1 diabetes after an infusion of programmed beta cells, the kind that respond to insulin. Researchers in Japan tried transplanting retina cells into blind people. So far, there have been only a few demonstrations of reprogramming as a way to treat patients. In practice, though, the formula for producing specific cell types can prove elusive, and then there’s the problem of getting lab-grown cells back into the body. Scientists realized they could potentially manufacture limitless supplies of nearly any type of cell-say, nerves or heart muscle. A key breakthrough came in the early 2000s, when Japanese researchers hit on a simple formula to turn any type of tissue into powerful stem cells, similar to ones in an embryo.
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