Posted on 10/06/2006 7:01:22 AM PDT by Dark Skies
The government is providing 1.85 million pounds of funding to a Cambridge-based company that is building a robot to help treat baldness.
Biosciences firm Intercytex aims to perfect a treatment that involves taking hair follicles from the back of the neck, multiplying them and replanting them where they are needed.
The company said on Friday it had been awarded funding from the government's Technology Programme, which it planned to use to develop a robotic system to speed up the painstaking process of multiplying the hair cells before they are replanted.
"The technology is challenging. No one has done this before," Intercytex Chief Executive Nick Higgins told Reuters earlier this week.
"We take cells responsible for hair growth, multiply them and then inject them in the head. We tease out the cells responsible for growing a new hair.
"The challenge is to make sure they grow thick enough and quick enough so they are cosmetically acceptable," he added.
The most common form of baldness is triggered by the male hormone dihydrotestosterone, which causes follicles to shrink and hair to thin before disappearing altogether.
Intercytex's research is now in intermediate Phase II testing after having safely been trialled on a handful of volunteers.
The hair is taken during a 30-minute operation under anaesthetic and replanted three weeks later after the cells have had time to grow.
Shares in the firm, which have receded around 30 percent since listing on London's junior AIM market in February, rose 0.6 percent to 88 pence by 0900 GMT.
The really big breakthrough will be when scientists can efffective transplant ear and nose hair. There's so much more of it after 40.
lol...the look on the guys face says it all.
Or maybe figure out a way to make eyebrows grow extra long and the simply comb them back.
Please, my eyebrow is transplantable already. Takes a weed whacker to keep it from assuming Pierre Salinger sunshade proportions while dividing it in half once again.
Re baldness, why can't the entire scalp just be detached and rotated 180 degrees?
;^)
Yikes!
There are docs out there transplanting back and chest hair to the head, I kid you not. The results ain't pretty.
This seems like a rather mechanical approach to a hair-raising problem.
Guys would be better off shaving their heads, staying fit, and getting a good career.
I shave my head and stay fit. Never have a bad hair day.
I shave my head, too. Being bald would save me a lot hassle.
You know, the sunlight reflecting off your heads, well, it kind of dazzles our eyes and makes it hard to see.
So we have to scream "The light, the light, the horrible, horrible light!"
They extract stem cells from the hair root from hairs that are still viable. They culture and grow up and passage these stem cells, "plating them out". Then, after growing them up in cell media, they re-implant the cultured hair stem cells elsewhere on the scalp.
They are NOT re-locating hairs. Hair re-location robot MY ASS!
Very interesting science, but an impossibly badly written article --the author was a TOTAL RETARD.
I'm not bald, just shaven. So my head really isn't shiny.
lol...fuggedabbadit.
I have a few friends who also shave their heads and we all agree, once you start shaving your noodle, you wouldn't want hair again under any condition.
I started to let mine grow once (I still have most of my hair though it's thinner on top) for a hiking trip in the snow and ice a few years ago and I made it four days before I had to shave it off again.
Also, if you exercise a lot (I am a bicyclist and lift weights), it's nice not having to dry your hair after every shower.
I thought the written was, well, strange, but it appeared as written in Scientific American as well as other sources.
By using the term, "robot", it makes people think some electro-humanoid is plucking individual hairs out.
Actually, the work is much more biochemical.
I do believe the biz model is sound --even if sneered at by mainstream biochemists (who prefer heart disease and cancer-related research), and I think the technology absolutely will pan out, even if another small company somehow beats them to the punch.
It's a kind of academic SNOBBERY, and it is buttressed by the notion that a guy is naturally supposed to be completely unworried about his looks (which is why soooooo many people have affection for Bill Gates over, say, Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs...).
Robo-Floyd: Part man. Part machine. All barber. The future of hair care.
I need to brush up on my puns, Rennes. I had to comb through FR to find this, but now, alas, I must part.
If lack of punning was a problem, you certainly got to the root of it. I think many don't pun just to avoid entanglements. Others just wig out.
"I need to brush up on my puns, Rennes. I had to comb through FR to find this, but now, alas, I must part."
Ah, well, hair today, gone tomorrow. Pate-ing is such sweet sorrow.
"If lack of punning was a problem, you certainly got to the root of it. I think many don't pun just to avoid entanglements. Others just wig out."
Hey, you're not fur from the truth there. I don't want to split hairs, but on the rare occasions when I don't pun, it's because I'd simply prefer not to make a statement that can be permanent-ly held against me.
Toupee or not toupee, that is the question. Well, I think weave said enough.
"Hey, you're not fur from the truth there. I don't want to split hairs, but on the rare occasions when I don't pun, it's because I'd simply prefer not to make a statement that can be permanent-ly held against me."
That statement seems a little frizzy to me; but no matter, I'm just going to gel out.
"Toupee or not toupee, that is the question"
A rather bald statement. You always manage to come up with something. Hairdo you do it?
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