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Bosley Medical
San Francisco
50 Francisco Street,
Suite 440
San Francisco, CA 94133
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From Hair Loss Help Forum
Hairlosshelp.com
Interview with Dr. Ken Washenik, Bosley Medical
HairlossHelp.com conducted this revealing two hour interview with Dr. Ken Washenik at the Aderans Research Institute's offices in Beverly Hills, California in December 2002.
PART 1
HAIRLOSSHELP: What is the state of the Aderans Research Institute? Is it functional?
DR WASHENIK: The ARI was officially opened on July 1, 2002. We have a laboratory in Philadelphia which is where Kurt Stenn is stationed, our Chief Scientific Officer. It's housed in a biotech incubator space at the University of Pennsylvania. And at the same time in Atlanta we have a laboratory which is where our bioengineering group is located.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Who does what at the two facilities?
DR WASHENIK: The group in Philadelphia is looking at the molecular cell biology aspect and the group in Atlanta is looking at how we take those cells and put them into the patient's skin in a way that's routine and gives predictable results from patient to patient.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is Bioamide part of the group in Atlanta?
DR WASHENIK: Yes, that was formerly Bioamide which was acquired by us and combined with some additional scientists under Kurt Stenn.
HAIRLOSSHELP: When you took over Bioamide they were already working on their own projects. Have you let them continue working on their existing projects or have you diverted them to now work on something that you have envisioned is the right way to go?
DR WASHENIK: I would say both. The scope of what they were working on has definitely been expanded because of the scientists in Philadelphia and a broadening of the cellular biology knowledge that Kurt Stenn's group has brought into it, but the basic concept is still the same.
HAIRLOSSHELP: The reason why I am asking is that they have an existing patent whereby they inject cells under the skin as a progenitor of a hair follicle, which was very interesting.
DR WASHENIK: Yes, they are still working on that and all the intellectual property they had before they are continuing to work on now.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How successful was that research?
DR WASHENIK: If you look at publicly presented publications on this technology, hair cloning, there are only two records of people having done that with human hair. One was Colin Jahoda who had that paper published in Nature, and the other one was Tom Barrows from Bioamide who presented a paper at a bio engineering conference in Switzerland in 2001. Bioamide did grow hair in one patient using cultured dermal follicular fibroblasts or dermal papilla cells. So they are the only ones who have taken human cells, cultured them, injected them back into a person and have gotten hair to grow.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Was this follicular neogenesis, creating brand new follicles from scratch, or reactivating an existing dormant follicle?
DR WASHENIK: It was follicular neogenesis, creating a follicle from scratch. Now not enough work has been done yet for us to know if this will always be the case. We don't know if a surgeon who places a progenitor of cells near a dormant follicle will cause it to be reactivated. I would prefer that this be the case because then we don't have to worry about direction, location and naturalness of the hair. So that's my fantasy but it looks for now like it will be follicular neogenesis.
HAIRLOSSHELP: When was this procedure done and was it performed on one of their staff members?
DR WASHENIK: No this was a patient and it was done just over a year ago.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Have they been following the progression of this hair since this time?
DR WASHENIK: No, the hair is gone. It was cut out and analyzed because of the need for information so it was studied and not left in the patient to grow.
PART 2
HAIRLOSSHELP: Would it not be important to leave it in the patient's head to see if it will cycle?
DR WASHENIK: Absolutely. There is no doubt that the next step is to let hair continue to grow. When it becomes routine to grow hair you won't be so excited that you will want to remove the follicle and study it. In the future it should happen in such a consistent fashion that you could take half of the new follicles out and leave the rest in and watch the hairs to see if they cycle. The big question is what will happen after the 3-year cycle of anagen, catagen and telogen, will it then go back into anagen again.
HAIRLOSSHELP: In that experiment, what cells were used as the progenitor of the hair follicle?
DR WASHENIK: The cells in that experiment were dermal papilla cells or dermal follicular fibroblasts.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is that what they are using now in the current research?
DR WASHENIK: The current work involves looking at a number of different cell types and combinations of cell types as opposed to just picking one set of cell types. We are looking at what will most consistently grow hair as opposed to what will once in a while grow hair.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is it your personal opinion that it's a combination or cocktail of cells that will work best?
DR WASHENIK: Yes, I think there has to be an exchange between the cells. What we are really trying to do it to duplicate what happens when hair follicles are first created in a fetus. And that happens as a result of an interaction or exchange of cytokines, or chemicals, between different cells. So chemicals are exchanged between keratinocytes in the epidermis and the fibroblasts in the dermis. They communicate back and forth and several of those molecules have been identified and several have not. And how you deliver those is a problem.
Most likely you are going to have to get those keratinocytes and fibroblasts to communicate. So what's the most sensible way? One of the ways is getting those cells together to see how much or what percentage you need of each of them. The other possibility is can you introduce a pure population, like in this case the fibroblasts of the dermal papilla and have it communicate with keratinocytes that are already there. And that's what needs to be better studied. You may need to place both together, or you may just need to have one so it can communicate with the cells already in your skin.
HAIRLOSSHELP: At what point in the development of the fetus does the development of the hair follicle take place? And I know it's a controversial idea, but is there any way you can learn something from studying fetuses themselves?
DR WASHENIK: (Laughs) Its more than controversial, it just cannot be done. It's very early in the pregnancy. And there is just no way it can be done. But we should not need to; we should be able to learn all we need from cell culture in a laboratory.
HAIRLOSSHELP: I just thought that if they could examine the tissue at the appropriate time of follicle formation, they could tell exactly what was going on instead of just speculating.
DR WASHENIK: Well that was actually done years and years ago by studying fetuses that died at different time points so they pretty much know the morphology, the histology and the anatomy of what's happening. The thing that you can't tell is what chemical exchange is going on. If you look at dermatology textbooks the follicle formation is really well documented. Its starts out where there is nothing, just flat skin, and then what you have next is a condensation of cells in the dermis which is really just a vague gathering of cells just under the flat epidermis in what we call the ectoderm. So that's called the dermal condensation and that's the very beginning of the dermal papilla. And when that starts, its like the chicken and egg scenario because no one is sure if the epidermis dictates the formation of the condensation, or of the condensation just occurs on its own and then starts to dictate to the epidermis. But the first thing you can see morphologically in the formation of a hair follicles is the condensation. Then you get what's called the bud formation which is just a downgrowth of skin which is called the hair peg. This is a very early finger-like indentation in the epidermis which grows down towards this condensation of fibroblasts, and then that combines and gradually matures into the dermal papilla and the hair follicle.
PART 3
HAIRLOSSHELP: Are Tom Barrows and his team going to use their polymer matrix to implant these cells into the skin?
DR WASHENIK: Yes and that's an area that's been worked on for some time. The problem of if you are going to put cells into the skin, what are you going to put them in. And yes you need some type of matrix or scaffold to introduce the follicle progenitor into the skin. You are almost making your own hair bud, so there needs something to give cohesiveness to the cells.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Assuming that you get that going, how do you know you will get the signaling you need to get the whole process started?
DR WASHENIK: A big concern is if you have all the parts together will it work. Its almost like if you put all the parts of a car together in a garage will you have a car forming, or just a pile of parts. So everyone from a research perspective is depending on nature to fix that because right now everyone is betting that when you put these cells together in the correct way, they will know how to take care of it. If that's not true and you have to start introducing regulatory substances, then it will be a lot more complicated and more difficult to predict which way to go. There are a lot of growth factors that have been uncovered over the years like Wnt and Beta-catenin and Lef-1 and others like Noggin and Sonic Hedgehog, which have all been implicated in hair growth. So each of these have a role in hair follicle formation but we are hoping that when you put the cells together they will decide how to start that cascade of regulatory substances that are needed.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is there any concern of skin cancers forming from the introduction of these cells?
DR WASHENIK: The concern of skin cancers with tissue engineering comes from concerns about some of those regulatory factors. For example we know that Sonic Hedgehog expression, which is known to be important in hair follicles, is also known to be a factor in people who have a disease called Basal cell nevus syndrome. These people grow countless numbers of basal cell skin cancers and Sonic Hedgehog has been implicated in that. And then there is work being done with the Wnt pathway with Beta-catenin and Lef-1 where they show if you over express the regulatory proteins you can gets these growths called Pilomatricomas. So it would be problematic if you have to introduce regulatory molecules from outside the body because its very hard to deliver them at the right time and in the right amounts when the cells need them. That's why the work that has been done with tissue engineered hair growth based on cellular technology assumes that you wont have to deliver those growth factors and the body will produce them in the correct fashion so there won't be any of these concerns. How you pull that off in terms of how you package those cells may be very dependent on how those cells interact in culture with one another before you even put them into the skin.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Have they done a lot of research on what happens when you put those cells together in culture?
DR WASHENIK: Yes there have been people who have worked on that and one of the things that is being studied is if you put together fibroblasts and keratinocytes in culture what starts to happen; you know, which chemicals are being exchanged back and forth. We need to see which regulatory pathways are being initiated by these cells and could you start to get hair follicle induction in culture and a lot of that work is ongoing as we speak.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Some people have diffuse loss and some have pattern loss, who are the best candidates for this follicular neogenesis or hair cloning technology?
DR WASHENIK: Early on, the way this has been looked at is a system that's called autologous where you take cells from one person, culture them, and put them back into the same person. In that case it probably won't have any use for patients with alopecia areata, alopecia universalis and alopecia totalis because that's an immune system disease and not a disease of the hair. But for people with scars or androgenetic alopecia or people with congenital lack of hair, burn victims; people who just have areas where they cant grow hair, it should work fine for all those. In fact it would even work for people who don't even have a medical condition and just want more dense and thicker hair.The dilemma however, with diffuse loss is that you may select cells from the back of the head that may still be subject to thinning. However it's not necessarily that bad because you may just be able to buy them some additional years of hair even if it's not permanent. Its often 20 years before you go bald from puberty, so these people may still he able to benefit for a long time.
PART 4
HAIRLOSSHELP: Would they be able to have a second treatment after that if they do lose that hair?
DR WASHENIK: Absolutely, they could still conceivably come back in say another 2 years and get another 10,000 hair seeds implanted.
HAIRLOSSHELP: In the future when this is being done, how long would it take from the time the hair seeds or hair progenitors are implanted, to the time they start to see hair growing?
DR WASHENIK: Probably right around 3 months.
HAIRLOSSHELP: When this technique comes out will you still be doing conventional transplants and will there still be a need to do conventional transplants?
DR WASHENIK: I think when the first generation comes out some people who lack a good hairline may need a conventional transplant just in the front, and then during the procedure their cells will be harvested and they will return 3-4 weeks later to get added density from the implanted hair cells. In others who already have good hairlines and just need increased density, they will just be able to have the hair cells cultured and implanted.
HAIRLOSSHELP: What about the next generation of this treatment? What will that offer and when will it become available?
DR WASHENIK: The next generation, which I think will come about 1-5 years later, will be able to make use of other peoples cells. So you would be able to get hair cells out of a bank, like a blood bank, and implant them into anyone. Then you will be able to pick and choose what type of hair and color you want. Although, some researchers seem to think that the person-to-person or allogeneic procedure, will come out sooner than the allopathic procedure. Their feeling is that its much more promising because in that case it's consistent. When you have different patients you are dealing with there are different variables based on their individual characteristics. When you are working with the same follicular fibroblasts all the time, you cut down on the number of variables giving you a more consistent result.
PART 5
HAIRLOSSHELP: Would it not be problematic because each time you create a new generation of cells you lose some of the information or characteristics. Isn't this going to limit how many times you can use the same set of cells?
DR WASHENIK: You probably would lose the inductive properties of the follicular fibroblasts over several generations or passages. And as I mentioned there are these growth factors or regulatory chemicals and proteins that are probably necessary. In fact there was a paper published about a decade ago where they show that you need this Wnt substance in the culture of dermal fibroblasts to retain their inductive potential over a certain amount of time. And its lost over several days, not years, so it is very important. So you will need those regulatory chemicals to make this possible.
HAIRLOSSHELP: (laughs) I guess that could open up a whole new market for people to sell their fibroblasts like people sell their hair for hair systems?
DR WASHENIK: Yea I think it may get to the point where you have a consistent source of donor hair seeds on demand frozen away so as not to lose their inductive potential. So you can grow them whenever you need them.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Would the fibroblasts retain the characteristics of the donor or would it inherit them from the recipient?
DR WASHENIK: That's a great question and goes back to the question of donor dominance. The theory is that is you take cells from someone that has thick black curly hair and implant them into someone else who has fine blonde hair; they will grow thick black curly hair. But that's not 100% known so people guess that because we know if you take whisker hair from mice and move those dermal follicular fibroblasts to other parts of their body like their ear, those cells will grow whisker hairs on their ears. So that argues for donor dominance. But there are a number of researchers who feel that if you take a very early precursor of the follicle and implant that, you may get the hair characteristics actually coming from the recipient, rather than from the donor. So that's just not known yet.
HAIRLOSSHELP: In order to speed up the research, are there any other types of tissue engineering that can help researchers advance their techniques in hair cloning?
DR WASHENIK: Yes there are several areas that we can learn from. Recently there has been a lot of excitement over a group that has been able to grow some teeth. A tooth, strangely enough, is an awful lot like hair, and a fingernail is a lot like a hair too, so those are areas where a lot of what they are working on can be translated into hair growth. Then there are other folks who have worked on growing cartilage. There is an FDA approved tissue engineering process to take cartilage say from your knee and grow up some cartilage cells in a lab and inject them back into your knee so you can replace your cartilage. That unfortunately is not the same because there is no organ, just a flat layer of cartilage cells. Hair is a lot tougher because its an organ and it has a three dimensional structure with multiple cells types. So that makes it a lot more difficult to do. But there is no doubt that any type of tissue engineering research or breakthrough in any field directly benefits researchers working in a different field.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How many groups are you aware of that are working on hair cloning?
DR WASHENIK: There do not seem to be a lot. Although there may be some that we don't know of, but as you know the hair research community is not gigantic so you tend to know everyone. I would say if I have to guess there are probably six or seven groups that I know of who are working with some degree of focus on hair research. There are more groups that are busy with organ neogenesis projects that also do some research on hair. But only six or seven focused specifically on hair.
PART 6
HAIRLOSSHELP: Why don't you name them if you can.
DR WASHENIK: Cooley, Intracytex, Yoshizato in Japan, Gho, Unger are the ones I am aware of.
HAIRLOSSHELP: What about Dr Sun from NYU?
DR WASHENIK: Dr Sun, T.T. Sun also known as Henry Sun has long done similar work to what Dr Robert Lavker has done at Penn and George Cotsarelis. They collaborate and have done a lot of the really revolutionary work in hair stem cell biology. Henry Sun and Bob Lavker have really established this whole field and have carried that same work into research on the eye. The epithelium of the eye has many of the same characteristics as the hair follicle. Interestingly the hair follicle is an immune privileged site; that means it's outside the surveillance of the immune system. And it's the same thing with the eye, the eye is an immune privileged site which is why we can do corneal implants.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Why can we not do person-to-person hair transplants then?
DR WASHENIK: The problem with hair is that even though its an immune privileged site it ends up being functionally not privileged because you end of with blood cells, fat cells and other tissue which get moved along with the follicle. So you have to have just the hair cells themselves, which is why with this technology it is possible to do an allogeneic transfer of cells. Now getting back to the original question about Dr Sun, George Cotsarelis who was the student of Henry Sun and Bob Lavker, is the next generation of people pursuing this research of keratinocyte stem cells.
HAIRLOSSHELP: What are the possibilities of someone donating their follicles like they donate their corneas? If these follicles are washed of their non-hair cells, can they be used?
DR WASHENIK: I don't see that being a possibility as it would be really difficult to get rid of these other cells that would cause them to be rejected by the recipient's immune system. Could you take just the hair cells from that person and use them? The answer is maybe, but you would not need to. If this research project comes about there will be no need for it. As long as you have a couple of hair cells on your body you can grow all the cells you need.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is there any limit to the density that can be achieved with follicular neogenesis?
DR WASHENIK: The limitations of how densely you can pack a scalp with a follicle based hair transplant are completely spatial. With cell based transplants you can pack them in as close as you can with regular transplants. But you can still come back later and do more of them to get even greater density. As long as spatially there is enough room to introduce an instrument to implant then, there are no limitations in terms of what density you can achieve.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How long would a person have to wait between each implantation session?
DR WASHENIK: I would guess about one or two weeks.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How will the cell packages be implanted? Will it be with a syringe or does it require special instrumentation?
DR WASHENIK: That's exactly what is happening right now. That instrumentation is being developed. I think it is very unlikely that it will be a simple syringe. What seems to be very critical is where you put these cells. The depth has to be correct and consistent within microns.
PART 7
HAIRLOSSHELP: Will there be any issue with where the follicles will be implanted like the hairline? And will the hairs be bigger or smaller and what about the direction of growth and things of that nature?
DR WASHENIK: It should look the same. Now there are some issues that will still have to be fine-tuned and finessed before this thing is ready to go. We need to know if there are a certain critical number or mass of cells you need to implant to get a certain diameter of hair. If there is then we can use this number to control the thickness of hair shafts so we can make a more natural hairline. We could even duplicate things like follicular units by planting groupings of cells together. As far as direction of hair growth goes you would have to be able to control the direction of the hair growth. Now in the back it won't make much difference, but in the front the angle of growth will be critical for a natural appearance. And that goes back to my previous comment where you may need to have hairs transplanted there to establish a natural looking hairline and the density will then be made up of the new follicles.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is there any way they can grow the follicles in a lab so that when they do implant them they are partially developed so they are able to control the angle and direction of growth?
DR WASHENIK: I don't see that. The reason I don't think so is that incubator you need to grow the follicles from the progenitor cells is the human skin and you can't quite reproduce that. You would have to find a matrix to grow it in.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Can't they grow it in cultured skin right now?
DR WASHENIK: The thing that cultured skin, or skin that's been grown in a lab lacks now, are appendages like sweat glands, follicles, sebaceous glands etc. These are the appendages that go with skin and make it true human epidermis. The skin you are able to grow in a lab right now only contains keratinocytes. So you are right that that it could be done in this type of incubator, but before this can be done the skin has to resemble true human skin with all the appendages. So this would be great if it could happen and someone was able to develop lab-cultured skin like this.
HAIRLOSSHELP: This big question that everyone obviously wants to know is how long will it take to develop this hair cloning or follicular neogenesis technique?
DR WASHENIK: I have been saying 5 years from the inception of Aderans Research Institute, which opened on July 1, 2002; but I want everyone to know that I am just guessing, it could be sooner.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is that 5 years to commercial release?
DR WASHENIK: I think it's realistic that 5 years from the opening of ARI we will have a commercially available product or a technology that's in the latter stages of development. Now bear in mind that research takes its own course so things may change. But let me explain why I say 5 years. If you take something like a brand new technology, it would likely take 3 years to get through the regulatory process. That's why I think it's reasonable, because I'm being conservative. Right now no researcher knows the exact regulatory steps the FDA will place on this procedure because it is brand new. There are not a lot of bioengineered organs you can point to to know exactly what the FDA will require. So I think 3 years is a reasonable period for regulatory pathway trials. That then means I am giving 2 years to get the actual package of technology together for submission to the FDA or appropriate regulatory authority so we can go forward with the clinical trials.
PART 8
HAIRLOSSHELP: Is there any possibility that you could have a breakthrough sooner where follicles are reactivated rather than created? And if so will you take that to market sooner?
DR WASHENIK: Well let's say that during our research we find that putting some of these hair cell progenitors back into the body does in fact reactivate existing follicles and therefore is not that different to follicular hair transplants. Then there would not be a lot of regulatory oversight so it would come out sooner. But so often people with hair loss are either disappointed by overly optimistic estimates or just believe plain old deception. So I want to resist that, but I have a lot of optimism about where this research is going and at the same time I want to give pretty conservative estimates. If something comes out in 3 years and not 5 years, no one is going to be mad at me. But if I say 3 years and 5 years later we don't have anything then people are going to be disappointed and think ill of me.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Do you think that in 2 years you can actually have a workable treatment? I mean if Bioamide already did it once, surely in 2 years you could be getting pretty consistent results?
DR WASHENIK: Yea, Bioamide did it and on a shoestring budget with a skeleton crew, and Aderans Research Institute has a good solid budget with a much-expanded crew and also people who bring a number of specific core competencies or areas of expertise that Bioamide did not have. And as far as I know none of these other companies like Intracytex have these areas of expertise and all of ours are dedicated to this one hair project. So that's why I think it's reasonable to get it done in 2 years.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How many people worked at Bioamide before you took them over?
DR WASHENIK: I think they probably had four people who were working full time on that project and some of those were administrators. So the research staff was obviously very limited.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How many people does ARI have?
DR WASHENIK: Right now were up to about 8 to 10 people in our laboratories, that's excluding administrators, and we are adding new people on an ongoing basis. So that's a good number of people who again are all working full time on this one project who also don't have any funding problems. So that why I think we have the core expertise necessary to get it done. What you need is a true interdisciplinary approach where each of those disciplines brings their strength to the table and I think that's what makes Aderan's Research Institute different.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Who is the person planning and coordinating the efforts of this team?
DR WASHENIK: The Chief Scientific Officer is Kurt Stenn, he is the person running this research project. I am Executive Vice President of Medical and Scientific Affairs, so in fact I am overseeing the direction of the whole project, the science and the clinical utility of how that can translate into restoring hair in patients. So both Kurt Stenn and myself are both important people in determining the day-to-day research. But a lot our researchers can easily run their own research programs because they are director level people, not entry-level people, so they are each up and running. What Kurt and I do is to try not to bridle that back too much and let them pursue the areas they think are fruitful and then gather that information to be used in the next step. So it's truly a think tank approach as opposed to a dictatorial approach.
PART 9
HAIRLOSSHELP: So they don't have unlimited time to do their research?
DR WASHENIK: No, this is strictly goal-oriented research. We have a very narrow focus as to what we have to achieve as a company. We have a bunch of people who have done research in a lot of different areas and people who are very accomplished in hair research, and they all know that this is not an academic pursuit, this is a very tangible clinical need and that is to generate new hair follicles. They have a specific goal and a limited time frame to achieve our goals of follicular neogenesis.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Now if this is successful, are you going to offer it exclusively through Bosley or will you license the technology to anyone interested in buying it?
DR WASHENIK: Since its not there yet I can't tell you. But the way I envision it I doubt that it will only limited to Bosley Medical and it will be available to anyone who is doing hair transplants.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Are you going to be publishing papers when you make certain breakthroughs or are you going to be keeping it quiet?
DR WASHENIK: We will probably not publish until the whole picture is complete. There are different goals in research and sometimes its research and education, but in our case its research and development. We have to get this out and to have someone take the time to write up papers doesn't make any sense now, we can write about it afterwards.
HAIRLOSSHELP: When you do have trials, where are you going to be recruiting patients from? Will you get them from websites like ours?
DR WASHENIK: Yes, when we are going through regulatory trials we have to go through whatever regulatory guidelines there are and if possible we will go though Hairlosshelp and other websites where people look for what's new in hair loss.
HAIRLOSSHELP: How much money has been invested in this company? I heard around a half million dollars, is that correct?
DR WASHENIK: The money that was put into this is significantly more than that and it's not a fixed amount. Depending on how the research matures and what the needs are, more money is available if necessary. But its an effort that is a lot more significant than a half million dollars.
HAIRLOSSHELP: So this is not just a PR exercise to make Bosley look good?
DR WASHENIK: No this is a very serious investment. They are not worried about making Bosley look good, if we don't pull this off I could get fired. They have made a very significant research and development commitment. You have a lot of companies who do this kind of thing who just want to get their name on something and they give some researchers a few thousand dollars to say they are supporting hair research. This is nothing like that, this is an industrial commitment that is in every step of the way sincere, dedicated and accountable.
PART 10
HAIRLOSSHELP: Whose idea was it to start this project?
DR WASHENIK: I'm not sure who started what, but I think a lot of why Aderans wanted to hire me to become the Medical Director of Bosley was for me to establish this hair cloning research institute. That's the specific reason they wanted to bring me on board. I have a long history of research experience in the area of pharmacology and hair growth and endocrinology. My PhD is in hormone metabolism but I think all those things aside, their real specific reason for bringing me to Bosley Medical was to establish this hair research institute.
HAIRLOSSHELP: So Aderans was very much behind this?
DR WASHENIK: Yes they sure were. This was something very early on in my discussions with them that I told them was my fantasy and that I believed that this is the future of hair restoration.
HAIRLOSSHELP: And they saw the vision?
DR WASHENIK: Yes, from what I was able to present to them they thought that it was both a reasonable and achievable goal and decided to back it 100%.
HAIRLOSSHELP: I think its great, its very encouraging that a company of that size and financial means has made this commitment otherwise it could take 10 times as long with different people making little discoveries all over the place.
DR WASHENIK: This has never been seen before in hair research. There has not been a commitment like this in the world of hair research and in fact the large drug companies in the United States seem to have moved away from doing hair research. So I think without this kind of effort, without someone just stumbling on something accidentally, it would be very difficult to accomplish. In a way I am glad for the people who took money away from hair research because it has enabled us to get the best people to come together to make this happen. Many of these people have approached companies in the past trying to get funding saying we can do this and have not been successful. So when they found receptive ears with the amount of investment money needed to accomplish it, that was just such a revelation for them. So if nothing else maybe our interest in pursuing this will cause our competitors to take another look at hair research. Maybe we have raised the bar and this will lead to more companies funding similar ventures.
HAIRLOSSHELP: The last question I have is what do you envision the cost being for people to get this procedure done?
DR WASHENIK: That's a question like the time issue, its completely unknown. Yet I would venture to say somewhere around the cost of a traditional transplant. It all depends on how much it will cost from a laboratory standpoint. I would hope that it will be in the same ballpark but right now I just don't now. If I had to guess I would say somewhere between $7,000-$15,000.
HAIRLOSSHELP: Dr Washenik, thank you so much for your time it was very informative and we wish you speedy success in this venture!
DR WASHENIK: You are most welcome.
SOURCES: Ken Washenik, MD, PhD, medical director, Bosley Medical; and clinical assistant professor of dermatology, New York University Medical Center. George Cotsarelis, professor of dermatology and director, Hair and Scalp Clinic, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia.
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