HairClone in the UK and Cell Research Corporation (CRC) in Singapore will form an international collaboration to develop treatments using human cell conditioned media to transiently stimulate hair growth in patients suffering from Androgenic Alopecia. CRC are developing clinical ATMPs based on human umbilical cord lining stem cells and have also developed a conditioned media from non-human cord lining stem cells that is successfully marketed as Calecim for cosmetic skin repair. Clinicians are also beginning to use this to transiently stimulate hair growth, that is estimated to address a £100M market in the US alone. HairClone are developing a human ATMP intended to permanently rebuild miniaturising follicles (to address the £6Bn surgical hair loss market) and has developed proprietary test systems based on transcriptomic analysis of plucked hairs as well as ex-vivo hair follicle and cell culture systems. The strategy for these two grants is to firstly develop information on the transcriptomic changes in patients following Calecim. HairClone will use its grant to expand our analytical hair follicle and cell culture techniques to develop test systems to analyse both Calecim and the human cell analogue medias using both Hairclone's and CRC's GMP cell cultures. This will be combined with proteomic analysis of the medias to produce mechanism of action data that we can use to develop a regulatory route map to regulatory approval. A transiently stimulating product would provide a cost effective precursor treatment to patients ahead of receiving the much more expensive cell repair treatment from HairClone and together with the test systems that could be independently marketed.

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A significant proportion of men (70%) and women (40%) around the world experience hair loss at some time in their lives. The primary cause is a disease called androgenic alopecia and this results in affected hair follicles miniaturising, producing thinner, shorter hair shafts, which gives the appearance that the hair is lost. Over 1.8 million people around the world seek surgical and non-surgical treatments for hair loss. This project brings together leading scientists and clinicians who will build on prior pre-clinical and clinical data to develop a treatment that uses cultured cells from a few unaffected hair follicles to rebuild thousands of these miniaturising hairs and permanently reverse the appearance of hair loss. For many people, hair restoration treatment would have a big impact on their confidence and quality of life. This also presents a huge market opportunity for the UK and it would be the first real indication that a mini-organ structure could be regenerated which would have a much wider impact on strategies used in other regenerative medicines.