Stemson is going to use minipigs in the next stage of their hair cloning research

[scientist_0005]

this is not my comment, I wanted to know your opinion on this subject, people with knowledge write here

i think thats total nonsense. first this has nothing to do with genetic therapy, second, i do not think it will be that expensive actually, certainly that does not seem to be their company philosophy and if they manage to perfect or improve the rate a
of behavior of their cells, it should be a lot cheaper as well. alexey clearly sais this is for people who cannot get a aHT bc of a lack of donor hair. in fact, people overstimate the market of rich billionaires who have such aggressive hair loss, cannot get a mormal hair transplant and at last, even care avout it to get such a treatment. it is a fantasy much like the idea that big pharma is suppressing research because "treatments are more lucrative than cures"

 

[Joxy]

Stem cells/iPSCs, as well CRISPR/Cas9 are relatively new technologies and requires time to create technology for mass production with high efficacy and quality.

Stem-cell start-ups seek to crack the mass-production problem​

Commercial outfits are building the tools and know-how to manufacture treatments using induced pluripotent stem cells in the quantities required for clinical use.

In the laboratory, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can seem like magic: derived from differentiated cells, they can then morph into surprisingly good replacements for pancreatic, brain, eye, heart and other cells. Some are being used in clinical trials to treat people with chronic conditions, including diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, that are driven by damage to such cells (see page S8).

But it’s magic done slowly, for one patient at a time. “Essentially, all the cells are made by hand, by highly trained scientists sitting in a clean room,” says Nabiha Saklayen, a physicist and chief executive of Cellino Biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a start-up developing a platform for manufacturing iPS cell therapies. “That’s not scalable.”

James Shapiro, a surgeon at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, concurs. Shapiro leads a team readying for a clinical study of pancreatic islet cells, created from iPS cells, that can take on the vital task of producing insulin in people with type 1 diabetes. Testing such transplants in a handful of patients “will be exciting and will move the needle quite a bit”, he says.

“But it won’t address the big challenge ahead for personalized medicine: how on Earth could we ever do this kind of work for thousands of patients?” Shapiro says. “Right now it takes a technician and a crew of other research associates working day and night to baby these cells along to grow them into islet-like cells.”

To become practical therapies, stem-cell-based regenerative treatments must conquer two overlapping manufacturing challenges: achieving highly standardized automated production; and doing so in vastly greater volumes than at present.

To make an iPS-cell-based therapy, scientists first change the genes expressed by the starter cells to de-differentiate them into a pluripotent state. Gradual refinement of the techniques involved has made that relatively straightforward. But those pluripotent cells must then be differentiated at scale into the desired cell type — typically a much more formidable undertaking, says Jeffrey Millman, a bioengineer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Biotech firms are responding to the challenge with an amazingly diverse range of technologies, says Bollenbach. Some companies are evolving production systems that were originally created to deliver other cell therapies, such as CAR-T cells used to treat blood cancers.

Other firms were launched to provide mass production and differentiation of iPS cells. In April, TreeFrog Therapeutics in Bordeaux, France, announced production of a single batch of 15 billion iPS cells in a week — an encouraging milestone. The company’s technology allows cells in the bioreactors to self-organize into aggregates similar to those formed by natural stem cells and protects them from shear stresses. TreeFrog is now working with several partners to build towards clinical trials for Parkinson’s disease and other conditions.

Stem-cell start-ups seek to crack the mass-production problem

Commercial outfits are building the tools and know-how to manufacture treatments using induced pluripotent stem cells in the quantities required for clinical use.

www.nature.com

 

[Joxy]

SLAS Technology’s October Issue Featuring “Establishment of a Robust Platform for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Using Maholo LabDroid” Now Available

Newswise — Oak Brook, IL – The October edition of SLAS Technology features the cover article, “Establishment of a Robust Platform for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Using Maholo LabDroid” by Miho Sasamata, Daisuke Shimojo, Haruna Sasaki-Iwaoka, Yukiko Yamagishi, Ph.D. (Astellas Pharma Inc., Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki, Japan), Hiromitsu Fuse, Yohei Nishi, Hidetoshi Sakurai, M.D., Ph.D., and Tatsutoshi Nakahata (Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan).

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are attractive for use in early drug discovery because they can differentiate into any cell type. However, maintenance cultures and differentiation processes for iPSCs require a high level of technical expertise. To overcome this problem, technological developments such as enhanced automation are necessary to replace manual operation. In addition, a robot system with the flexibility and expandability to carry out the maintenance cultures and the required differentiation processes would also be important.

The authors of “Establishment of a Robust Platform for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Using Maholo LabDroid” created a platform to enable the multiple processes required for iPSC experiments using the Maholo LabDroid -- a humanoid robotic system with superior reproducibility and flexibility. The accuracy and robustness of Maholo LabDroid enabled the authors to cultivate undifferentiated iPSCs for 63 days while maintaining the ability to differentiate the three embryonic germ layers. Maholo LabDroid maintained and harvested iPSCs in six-well plates, then seeded them into 96-well plates, induced differentiation and implemented immunocytochemistry. Maholo LabDroid was then confirmed to be able to perform the processes required for myogenic differentiation of iPSCs isolated from a patient with muscular disease and achieved a high differentiation rate with CV <10% in the first trial.

SLAS Technology’s October Issue Featuring “Establishment of a Robust Platform for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Using Maholo LabDroid” Now Available

The October edition of SLAS Technology features the cover article, “Establishment of a Robust Platform for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Using Maholo

www.newswise.com

 

[Joxy]

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging​

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.


iPS cells like this one are being studied by Japanese researchers for a myriad of healing and anti-aging benefits.

~~

~
It has been 15 years since Kyoto University Professor Shinya Yamanaka pioneered induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Much like fertilized eggs, iPS cells can transform into a variety of cells.
Remarkable developments continue, with research into applications for regenerative medicine and drug discovery, and the introduction of a “next generation type” with the potential to transform into a wider range of cells.
Recently, the possibility of applying iPS cell technology to improvements in the body’s capabilities and prevention of aging has emerged.

iPS cell research includes potential benefits for muscle diseases and anti-aging.

Enabling Production of Placental Cells ​

First introduced in 2006, iPS cells are created by introducing a special gene into cells taken from the skin or blood of an organism, and “initializing” them into a fertilized egg-like state that can change and grow into a variety of cells.
When an egg and sperm meet to form a fertilized egg, the cells that will become the placenta are formed inside. Then, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, the placenta, which supplies oxygen and blood from the mother to the fetus, is formed. The state of the iPS cells is similar to that of a fertilized egg after implantation. Therefore, up to now they were unable to form a placenta, which requires the state of a fertilized egg before implantation.
Recently, however, an initialization process has been devised for production of a next-generation type iPS cell that is more similar to the fertilized egg before implantation. A Kyoto University research team announced in April that they have succeeded ー for the first time in the world ー in producing cells that form the basis of the placenta using this technology.
If conditions such as infertility, thought to be caused by abnormalities in the placenta, can be duplicated using these next-generation cells, they could help scientists understand the cause of such conditions.
In addition, because these cells are considered to be equally suitable to changing into any type of cell, they are one step closer to “totipotency,” which further expands their range of potential applications.

Surgery using iPS cells is being carried out in Japan to determine how many heretofore untreatable diseases can benefit from iPS cell treatment.

Countering COVID-19​

A number of studies on clinical application in regenerative medicine, in which cells and tissues made from iPS cells are transplanted for treatment, are also underway.
Developments related to eye diseases have been quick. Since 2014, RIKEN and the Kobe City Eye Hospital have been transplanting retinal cells to patients with three different diseases. Osaka University has also conducted transplants of corneal cells.

RELATED:Osaka Researchers’ iPS Cells Transplant A Touchstone for Life-saving Regenerative Medicine

Other surgeries have been performed to transplant nerve cells into patients with Parkinson’s disease (Kyoto University), platelets into patients with aplastic anemia (Kyoto University), heart muscle cell sheets into patients with severe heart failure (Osaka University), and immune cells into patients with head cancers (Chiba University).
They are also helping to combat COVID-19. Kyoto University announced in April that it had discovered candidate treatment drugs using iPS cells. They administered 500 existing drugs to human iPS cells to determine whether or not they could prevent the invasion of a virus, one with a similar mechanism of infection to COVID-19, but safer. They found that a drug for osteoporosis and a hypoglycemic agent had promising effects.
The issue is cost. According to the iPS Cell Research Foundation of Kyoto University, which stores and supplies cells, it costs about ￥40 million JPY (about $370,000 USD) to produce iPS cells from the blood of one healthy person.
It then costs between ￥60 million and ￥100 million JPY ($550,000 to about $1 million USD) to transform these into various types of cells for transplantation into one person.
This high cost arises because work is done completely by hand and requires an enormous amount of time. The foundation is hurrying to automate and streamline the production process and hopes to reduce the cost of the entire process from creation to transformation to about ￥3 million JPY ($28,000 USD) by 2025.

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.

japan-forward.com

 

[werefckd]

Thanks for sharing those articles Joxy, they are in line with what the folks at Stemson are hinting their biggest challenges are right now.

Being able to automate the process of iPS cells differentiation is key, specially for them since they have to get the neural crest cells before the dp cells, doubling the complexity of it.

 

[Roeysdomi]

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging​

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.


iPS cells like this one are being studied by Japanese researchers for a myriad of healing and anti-aging benefits.

• • 
    
  • 
    

~~
View attachment 170479
~
It has been 15 years since Kyoto University Professor Shinya Yamanaka pioneered induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Much like fertilized eggs, iPS cells can transform into a variety of cells.
Remarkable developments continue, with research into applications for regenerative medicine and drug discovery, and the introduction of a “next generation type” with the potential to transform into a wider range of cells.
Recently, the possibility of applying iPS cell technology to improvements in the body’s capabilities and prevention of aging has emerged.

View attachment 170480iPS cell research includes potential benefits for muscle diseases and anti-aging.

Enabling Production of Placental Cells ​

First introduced in 2006, iPS cells are created by introducing a special gene into cells taken from the skin or blood of an organism, and “initializing” them into a fertilized egg-like state that can change and grow into a variety of cells.
When an egg and sperm meet to form a fertilized egg, the cells that will become the placenta are formed inside. Then, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, the placenta, which supplies oxygen and blood from the mother to the fetus, is formed. The state of the iPS cells is similar to that of a fertilized egg after implantation. Therefore, up to now they were unable to form a placenta, which requires the state of a fertilized egg before implantation.
Recently, however, an initialization process has been devised for production of a next-generation type iPS cell that is more similar to the fertilized egg before implantation. A Kyoto University research team announced in April that they have succeeded ー for the first time in the world ー in producing cells that form the basis of the placenta using this technology.
If conditions such as infertility, thought to be caused by abnormalities in the placenta, can be duplicated using these next-generation cells, they could help scientists understand the cause of such conditions.
In addition, because these cells are considered to be equally suitable to changing into any type of cell, they are one step closer to “totipotency,” which further expands their range of potential applications.

View attachment 170481Surgery using iPS cells is being carried out in Japan to determine how many heretofore untreatable diseases can benefit from iPS cell treatment.

Countering COVID-19​

A number of studies on clinical application in regenerative medicine, in which cells and tissues made from iPS cells are transplanted for treatment, are also underway.
Developments related to eye diseases have been quick. Since 2014, RIKEN and the Kobe City Eye Hospital have been transplanting retinal cells to patients with three different diseases. Osaka University has also conducted transplants of corneal cells.

RELATED:Osaka Researchers’ iPS Cells Transplant A Touchstone for Life-saving Regenerative Medicine

Other surgeries have been performed to transplant nerve cells into patients with Parkinson’s disease (Kyoto University), platelets into patients with aplastic anemia (Kyoto University), heart muscle cell sheets into patients with severe heart failure (Osaka University), and immune cells into patients with head cancers (Chiba University).
They are also helping to combat COVID-19. Kyoto University announced in April that it had discovered candidate treatment drugs using iPS cells. They administered 500 existing drugs to human iPS cells to determine whether or not they could prevent the invasion of a virus, one with a similar mechanism of infection to COVID-19, but safer. They found that a drug for osteoporosis and a hypoglycemic agent had promising effects.
The issue is cost. According to the iPS Cell Research Foundation of Kyoto University, which stores and supplies cells, it costs about ￥40 million JPY (about $370,000 USD) to produce iPS cells from the blood of one healthy person.
It then costs between ￥60 million and ￥100 million JPY ($550,000 to about $1 million USD) to transform these into various types of cells for transplantation into one person.
This high cost arises because work is done completely by hand and requires an enormous amount of time. The foundation is hurrying to automate and streamline the production process and hopes to reduce the cost of the entire process from creation to transformation to about ￥3 million JPY ($28,000 USD) by 2025.

New Era for iPS Cells: Infinite Possibilities for Healing, Even Anti-Aging

iPS cell research is moving ahead quickly with promising applications for COVID-19, diseases affecting vision and muscular function, among others. The issue to overcome next is cost.

japan-forward.com

Omg the insane amount of money … i believe stemson solution might be very pricey and they find out how to automate it

 

[scientist_0005]

these sums are absolutely insane

 

[froggy7]

very interesting how much Stemson will cost if they come to an end

 

[scientist_0005]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

 

[froggy7]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

it was one year ago....

 

[scientist_0005]

it was one year ago..

whats your problem?? do you want to chime in to tell us how its going to cost again? go ahead.

 

[froggy7]

whats your problem?? do you want to chime in to tell us how its going to cost again? go ahead.

a year ago they did not know maybe about the problems they have encountered in recent months, note that Geoff is more careful in his estimates, had they followed Alexey's schedule they would have started human trials.

 

[scientist_0005]

he also did not talk about the dht resistance issue

 

[trialAcc]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

This is from 2019/2020 though. Even here he says years away but what's changed after this video is that they realized that the idea of hair transplant surgeons preforming this is insane and will yield poor results. That's why they started working on machine learning to perfect it themselves.

 

[scientist_0005]

This is from 2019/2020 though. Even here he says years away but what's changed after this video is that they realized that the idea of hair transplant surgeons preforming this is insane and will yield poor results. That's why they started working on machine learning to perfect it themselves.

why is it insane and how would machine learning solve it? as i understand it they applied machine learning in form of computational biology to identify certain genes and molecules etc but not in getting it in the actual head

 

[Roeysdomi]

why is it insane and how would machine learning solve it? as i understand it they applied machine learning in form of computational biology to identify certain genes and molecules etc but not in getting it in the actual head

They plan to make robot that will do the hair transplant . But i wont might what kind of solution they would find as long as the clinical trails are good its a win for us

 

[werefckd]

stemson founder interview from a few months ago for anyone who has not seen it. in the end he also comments on his time frame estimation regarding progress

That video is very informative, it's from almost exactly one year ago

What have changed since then is that they raised an additional $15M of funding and doubled their research team.

What they are trying to accomplish is ultra ultra hard but they got their grips on it!

 

[froggy7]

That video is very informative, it's from almost exactly one year ago

What have changed since then is that they raised an additional $15M of funding and doubled their research team.

What they are trying to accomplish is ultra ultra hard but they got their grips on it!

where do you have data on doubling their team?

 

[trialAcc]

why is it insane and how would machine learning solve it? as i understand it they applied machine learning in form of computational biology to identify certain genes and molecules etc but not in getting it in the actual head

They're building ML models to actually do the transplanting by means of integrating robotics. A machine will be trained to map natural hair patterns and implant the synthetic scaffolds.

 

[Joxy]

The gold standard in cryopreservation is still conventional slow freezing of single cells or small aggregates in suspension, although major cell loss and limitation to non-specialised cell types in stem cell technology are known drawbacks. The requirement for rapidly available therapeutic and diagnostic cell types is increasing constantly. In the case of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) or their derivates, more sophisticated cryopreservation protocols are needed to address this demand. These should allow a preservation in their physiological, adherent state, an efficient re-cultivation and upscaling upon thawing towards high-throughput applications in cell therapies or disease modelling in drug discovery. Here, we present a novel vitrification-based method for adherent hiPSCs, designed for automated handling by microfluidic approaches and with ready-to-use potential e.g. in suspension-based bioreactors after thawing. Modifiable alginate microcarriers serve as a growth surface for adherent hiPSCs that were cultured in a suspension-based bioreactor and subsequently cryopreserved via droplet-based vitrification in comparison to conventional slow freezing. Soft (0.35%) versus stiff (0.65%) alginate microcarriers in concert with adhesion time variation have been examined. Findings revealed specific optimal conditions leading to an adhesion time and growth surface (matrix) elasticity dependent hypothesis on cryo-induced damaging regimes for adherent cell types. Deviations from the found optimum parameters give rise to membrane ruptures assessed via SEM and major cell loss after adherent vitrification. Applying the optimal conditions, droplet-based vitrification was superior to conventional slow freezing. A decreased microcarrier stiffness was found to outperform stiffer material regarding cell recovery, whereas the stemness characteristics of rewarmed hiPSCs were preserved.


Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), reprogrammed from somatic cells, have the potential of unlimited self-renewal and the capacity to differentiate to any cell type of the body [1,2]. Starting from healthy or diseased individuals as donors, hiPSCs serve as a starting point for patient- and disease-specific cells and thus take the field of regenerative medicine, developmental biology, and diagnostics to the next level [3]. This cutting-edge discovery has enabled disease-specific models for drug screening, e.g. amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [4], retinitis pigmentosa [5] or cardiomyopathies [6], and even curative cell-based therapies to be developed [7,8]. Prominent targets for the latter are opthalmological diseases, where hiPSC-derived retinal epithelial cell are developed as advanced therapy medical product (ATMP) to treat age-related macula degeneration [9]. A basic prerequisite for these broad fields of applications is the sufficient supply of hiPSCs and a robust logistic for hiPSCs and hiPSC-derived ATMPs. Current biotechnological approaches develop protocols and devices for large-scale expansion to secure the supply of undifferentiated hiPSCs [10]. Whereas conventional expansion strategies utilise standard adherent cultivation techniques in manual procedures, novel approaches implement suspension-based bioreactors with higher throughput in concert with the optimization of medium to biomass ratios leading to the possibility for automated on-line monitoring and sample manipulation [11]. Such bioreactors combine the benefits of large scale production with the option to either run the process in the well-known conventional two-dimensional cultivation routine using microcarriers as a growth surface [12] or as three dimensional cell cultures as an optimal starting point for subsequent differentiation processes [13]. However, little progress has been made towards reaching the goal of storing bulk quantities of viable and fully functional cells in an application-oriented manner. Whereas cryopreservation is still the only option to store viable biomaterial for unlimited time, the current cryotechnological infrastructure in biobanks is designed for keeping cell-stocks in relatively small aliquots (e.g. 1 ml cryovials) followed by expansion and cell manipulation routines at the recipient's site to finally achieve the desired cell state and format [14]. The conventional and most commonly used cryopreservation method for hiPSCs is a slow freezing protocol of single cells in suspension applying cooling rates of approx. −1 °C/min [15]. Despite the addition of various cryoprotective agents (CPAs), like 10% dimethyl sulfoxide (Me2SO), thawed hiPSCs show poor re-attachment and recovery rates [16]. Besides the damaging effects caused directly by the formation of ice crystals during freezing which indiscriminately affects any cell type, the sensitivity of hiPSCs to the necessary detachment and dissociation process using enzymatically active agents is a main reason for this reduced viability [17]. The use of Rho/Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor can support both the dissociation as well as the cryopreservation process by reducing the incidence of dissociation-induced cell death but has been reported to cause unwanted effects [18,19]. Although there are promising approaches to cryopreserving adherent cells by means of conventional slow freezing protocols [20,21,22], application-oriented routines for large-scale cryopreservation are missing especially for sensitive hiPSCs. A second cryopreservation regime, vitrification, enables the maintenance of cells in their adherent state, thus avoiding potentially harmful dissociation steps. With ultra-fast cooling rates and adjusted CPA concentrations within the sample, ice formation and thus damaging mechanisms like osmotic shock, water depletion and mechanical membrane ruptures are avoided [23]. The superiority of vitrification especially for tissue engineered products, has already been demonstrated for encapsulated bone marrow stem cells in alginate-fibrin-beads [24] as well as for adherent mesenchymal stem cells on alginate-beads [25]. However, up until now, vitrification approaches have required skilled handling and are only valid for small sample sizes, making it unsuitable for bulk storage [26,27]. Here we report a novel approach combining the advantages of alginate-based microcarriers with modifiable characteristics for cultivation of hiPSCs together with a vitrification approach. The process was designed for automation, allowing application-oriented large-scale cryopreservation towards ready-to-use storable hiPSCs in suspension-based bioreactors. In addition, the findings presented in this study lead to the hypothesis of an optimal adhesion time prior to cryopreservation dependent on cell type and matrix elasticity.

Droplet-based vitrification of adherent human induced pluripotent stem cells on alginate microcarrier influenced by adhesion time and matrix elasticity

The gold standard in cryopreservation is still conventional slow freezing of single cells or small aggregates in suspension, although major cell loss …

www.sciencedirect.com