Square1

Who exactly needs to give a "green light" to perform this on ourselves? If you want, you can already do it right now, like Kilian did.

The upside of just wounding and treating balding zones with verteporfin is that it doesn't require a hair transplant surgeon to perform, it could just be done in a regular beauty clinic where they perform microneedling. Maybe with some instructions on how to apply vp. I think I agree that the chances of success are not the best, but if somebody wants to fund that, all power to them and I would only lead to more knowledge about the working of this drug, which is good in itself.

When you count 5 cases of vp working, which are these except from the first of dr. Barghouthi? The 3 cases of dr. Bloxham? I find those less convincing to be honest. To me it is not a foregone conclusion yet that vp does what we all hope it does. Luckily, with the trials of Kilian, dr. Barghouthi 2 and hopefully dr. Bisanga, we will have a lot more information in a couple of months. I however completely agree with your last sentence. If all these new trials are positive, the question whether we can repeat the process on the same follicles with the same regeneration rate will be crucial.

How much time for 1 patient do you estimate this amounts to? If there is a fundraiser to pay the surgeon for these hours and for the verteporfin itself, while a regular patient that agrees to vp-usage pays for the procedure itself, what argument would potentially be nullified right?

Awesome news about dr. Bisanga and thanks to Melvin again to convince him. Like Melvin pointed out, is it good that he is a sceptic so any eventual positive findings won´t be met with the criticism that he is basically a fanboy. Also, is it clear that he has nothing to gain from this research since he already is a world class surgeon with presumably the income that comes with it. Interesting ideas as well on how to test the efficacy of vp. Not just photos or hair counts, but advanced tracking and matches techniques. Sounds interesting. With such a protocol, any eventual findings will be taken very seriously I think. I only hope he doesn't run into problems or loss of motivation since he doesn't seem super excited to do it. Good development though. If funding becomes a problem for this one, I am inclined to chip in. If that is the sticking point for the dr. Mohebi trial, the same applies.

Although several experiments have taken place, any hard data on the efficacy of vp is unfortunately not yet present. It might be my autistic fixation on numbers, but I think that having these would go a long way in getting the movement ahead. Pictures can be very helpful, but also misleading due to things like lighting, angles etc and are therefore a lower form of evidence. If a reputable doc would find that a donor area has 80 grafts per cm2, from which 30 were removed and the part that was tested with vp contains 65 grafts /cm2 while the untreated area consistantly has 50 grafts /cm2, it becomes really hard to ignore the regeneration, especially if the following studies confirm that finding. Given that your organisation donated a capable device for this to dr. Barghouthi, you must have some credit in the bank to at least ask him what the plans are, right? Especially since he also got funds from the community to do such an experiment. That such information is only shared with those who have contributed something is understandable and logical.

In research, presented findings should be able to be challenged with a critical mind.

His first experiment meant that, if completely legit, the (functional) cure for balding is just around the corner. Why he isn't following up is unclear to me. The reasons he gave were not very convincing to an outsider and came across to me as excuses. It could be the case the there are just things he can better avoid talking about in public, but really plans on continuing once these issues are resolved. Also, there are no logical reasons for dishonesty that are known to me. He is not making money on it whatsoever. He could be busy, but I would doubt that. The experiment involves him doing his normal job with just an extra step. Sadly, the possibility of some misleading but unintentional mistakes can not be ignored. I don't think this is the case, as there are no logical reasons for it, but who knows. Anyways, it would be crucial going forward to know what the reason of this delay is.

I would argue that the visual art of improvement and statistical progress are more or less the same thing. If someone would regenerate 100% of their donor hair during a hair transplant, no grafts are lost there so in that sense it is undetectable and therefore visually optimal. The only thing is that data is less subjective than visuals and would go a long way to convince doctors to experiment as well. Best of luck anyways, will be following your journey if you choose to make it public

Best of luck on your recovery and growth / regeneration! It is a great thing that you are doing this, not just (hopefully) for yourself, but for the community as well as this gives another data point and insight in the working of vp. In that last regard, did dr. Saifi keep statistics on how many grafts were removed and how many remained per cm2? That would give a great insight in whether there actually is generation in the treated areas.

Good news! Hope they are keeping statistics on extracted and remaining follicles per cm2 and will assess them periodically with a trichoscan, but I guess they don't. Despite this, this is a great development of course.

The post you refer to, was just Jonathan theorizing about what could be going on. Not even implying bad faith or any wrongdoing from the doc. That is just not "blaming without proof". Jordan has more than 11M inhabitants and dr. Barghouthi has an international reputation. I doubt that the lack of a suitable volunteer is a real issue.

The lack of docs willing to participate in trials regarding verteporfin is leading to desperation in this thread. There is a process taking place in which we look like a cult. Understandable but not really helpful. Asking critical questions should be encouraged, not discouraged in fear of hurting somebodies feelings. This is, in fact, science and not religion. The pioneering work of dr. Barghouthi is great. We can only hope that he expands on it with more trials. Will that happen? I hope so, but there must be something going on we don't know. If you, as a doctor, seen the results you have delivered with a novel treatment that you pioneered, wouldn't you continue with more work as soon as possible?

Well, if other drs aren´t picking up on it now, why would they do it in 20 years? The movement really needs new developments / successes in order to keep going and to maintain relevancy. Like a poster on th Dutch forum that I post on asked "If you guys are so convinced of this working, why aren't there more developments going on?". I did not have a real answer to this one. Dr. Barghouthi's second trial starting would be more than welcome in that regard. It has been delayed for more than hald a year I think at this point. Possibly for very valid reasons, but to me they are unknown. In general, you would say that if you are so close to functionally curing hair loss, you would continue until you get there.

I think the likelihood of the pictures being real is higher than them having been touched. I see no reason for all parties involved to put their reputation on the line for something they don't personally benefit from. If advanced algorithms show that as well, it would make the case for vp stronger as it would increase the legitimacy of the pictures. In my view, that would be the best way to deal with negative speculation.

How much is the cost of verteporfin alone to cover a whole donor area for a FUE-procedure?

It takes just 1 vain rich guy to see these excellent preliminary findings and decide to throw a million $ at it to fund all kinds of trials. Whether succesful or not, in 1 to 2 years we likely know everything these it to know about the drug in relation to hair loss. Musk is rich and certainly vain, if you are crazy enough to buy twitter for 44.000 million, why not spend 1 million to have a very reasonable chance to cure hair loss, which he suffers from himself and has taken steps towards hiding / treating? I still think the word is not out there enough. Such guys would probably hand out this $1M like candy if they would have the information we have.

He agreed, but it is not legally binding or anything. If the enthousiasm about vp wanes, he might cancel it himself as well or postpone it indefinitely.

If we look at this purely from a commercial point of view, what up- and downsides would experimenting with 1 patient be exactly? For downsides it obviously costs money to buy the verteporfin / visudyne. How much would that be exactly? I have seen some differing numbers, I thought the estimation that Fox gave was rather low. A customer that pays the normal rate for an HT could provide this himself, so the doc has no costs on it. Also, the doc needs to familiarize himself with what vp actually is and how to apply it. Furthermore, he needs more time than normally to assess the progress of the patient. Either in person or with sent-in pictures, like dr. Bloxham does. Let's say getting familiar takes 2 working days and the monitoring 1 hour a month. These would be costs for the doctor unless the patient would take part in these costs as well. The upsides for the doc would be name recognition / exposure and, if vp does produce results, knowledge about dosing and technique that gives him an edge over his competition. Would it be useful to look at a country like Turkey, which is famous for it translant industry, to see if a somewhat reputable doc is willing to participate? Maybe Western docs are too comfortable with the way is it and the money they are already making, therefore lacking the incentive to experiment in most cases.

While I do agree with your assessment of the general vibe of that forum, they were over stuff like Stemson and Tsuji as well. Experimental research that has basically never shown any results yet, has to be tested rigorously for safety and faces years and years getting approved and even if that would all happen, easily will cost as much as an average house. Yet, what I can see, no discussion on vp. Maybe it has taken place but it is not prominent at all, while vp would be much more affordable way sooner with a higher likelihood that it will even happen. So even if you are into fairytales and wonderpills, vp comes closer than the stuff they obsess about. But maybe you are right, hard to tell at this point.

Exactly, there are lively discussions on all those treatments that are bound to fail, but as far as I see, there is no talk about vp. Are they just unaware / stupid or do they see things we don't?

The science as well as the preliminary results are promising indeed. That is why it surprises me that there are few docs trying it out. Maybe not the top guys, but the lesser known surgeons in the West or in countries like Turkey and India have a lot to gain by perfecting this method. I think.

All this time, I get the feeling that I / we miss something very obvious. The guys over at hairlosstalk are very involved in the hairloss industry, but are not talking about vert at all. They were however all over all kinds of either obvious scams or possibly legit projects that would however take at least 10/15 to commercialize such as Brotzu, Sheseido, Tsuji, Stemson etc.etc. Now HMI-115 is the big deal there. I havent followed it very closely, but in terms of potential, it doesn't seem to come close to vp. Given the results that dr. Barghouthi has shown, I would expect everybody in this space to focus on vp. Despite some interest of docs and of course the trials of dr. Bloxham, there doesn't seem to be that much happening. I would expect much more young and ambitious docs to try this stuff, but dr. Bloxham is so far the only one who did. And for him and dr. Barghouthi , it doesn't seem to be a topic that is that important. Could it be that we are overblowing the results? Maybe we miss something that makes dr. Barghouthi's pics less impressive? Maybe the higher density in the test area has other reasons than vp? It is an optical illusion that others see through but we don't?

So all my theories about dr. Bloxham not showing results because of alterior motives can go into the dustbin Nice results in the sense that at least some regrowth is observed. Hopefully we can establish percentages in upcoming trials and answer questions about the possibility to achieve the same regrowth with already transplanted grafts.