How many here have actually read the interview with Kyocera Riken?
https://www.hairlosstalk.com/news/new-research/hair-primordiums-tsuji-organ-interview-sept2016/
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions here regarding how much hair they can clone and how they're going to transplant it.
The average hair transplant costs 8-12,000 USD. How much is this gonna cost?
"Generally speaking, the price is usually expensive during initial commercial stage, and frankly speaking, we have to admit the same for our case as well. However, after that, as the number of patients increases, we believe that we will be able to better control the price, and we definitely should be able to do so. Therefore, this is our long-term plan, but we plan to eventually lower the price to the level at which anybody can benefit from this therapy."
Do you plan to license this technology to surgeons worldwide, or do you have any plans to create devices which may help automate the grafting process to make results more consistent and uniform?
"So, at the initial phase, we plan to use only the surgeons having the level of skills which meets our criteria in order to enables us to ensure stable effectivity and safety. Eventually, in the future, we plan to transfer our technologies to surgeons at clinics in order to increase the number of certified surgeons certified in order to have our technology widely used. As for the last question of automating the transplanting process, as Toyoshima has touched on this earlier, we think that automating the transplanting process is an effective means to ensure stable effects. Therefore, we would like to consider developing a device to automate follicle transplants in the future."
If this method succeeds, demand will be in the hundreds of millions of people. Can you describe your current thinking on how production could be expanded to meet such a large demand?
"At this point now, we have already started considering about production stability and efficiency. And, as we announced in the recent press release, this led us to reach an agreement with KYOCERA Corporation to jointly develop cell processing devices, etc. to produce follicular primordiums. Eventually, we believe that not only automating the follicular primordium production process, which is only a part of the entire production process, but also automating the entire production process will enable us to further increase the production capacity efficiently. We are also considering to set up treatment locations or cell processing bases in major cities around the world. Therefore, in order to achieve this, we will need to establish a system/structure which allows us to offer our therapy at a broader range of locations including clinics. As a company, by increasing the production capacity,
we aim to offer our service to about 10,000 patients a year around the world, therefore we recognize the need for developing a system/structure which enables us to achieve this goal."
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Now, here are the more important questions for those of you who are unconcerned with the money or the details:
You have already touched on this, but in terms of offering this therapy to people around the world, will a separate regulatory approval process be required in each country?
"Yes, each country requires
its own registration/approval. But,
as far as we talk about the Japanese market, we are planning to offer it to the general public as a treatment in 2020."
This means that if there's someone you need to blame, it's the FDA. Unless you can cough up the money for a trip to Japan.
How many hair follicles can you clone?
"[...] Collectively from these researches, we think that we may be [able to] increase follicles
at least by about 1,000 times."
This means you can get your hairline back
and then some. I would also like to point out that they've figured out how to control the thickness and colour of the hair, meaning that they will be able to give you a completely natural hairline with baby hairs in the front and the whole shebang:
"[...] Our technology enables us to regenerate miniaturized follicles with 1-hair in the front, while regenerating thick follicles with 2- or 3-hair toward the back of the head."
How are you going to transplant/collect the hair follicles?
"Our transplanting technique was developed based on the FUT, Follicular Unit Transplantation, which is the surgical autografting used by hair transplant surgeons for hair loss treatment. [...] It will leave almost no scar… the scar will not visible at all. Yes, so the process requires a skin incision, but please understand that the incision will be about
the same size as a needle head."
This means you can forget about them having to cut out a long strip of skin and hair.
A needle head, people. That's all they need. Like I said before, they take a tiny amount of hair follicles and increase them by a thousandfold
at the very least.
How long do you have to wait before you can see the results?
"3 to 6 months."
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You got it straight from the horse's mouth here. Having said all of these things, who can now provide newer information which can refute the answers given in this interview?
