Magic City

Your results are fantastic my friend, congratulations. I'm sure he's told you but I had my second procedure with Dr Lorenzo last week on the same day as your brother. When he described that his brother had also had a transplant the year previous, and with the scalp conditions, I put the pieces together and realised he was speaking about you. Such a small world! You were in the surgery room whilst your brother and I were waiting for our head washes/post op assessment by the Doctor a few doors away. I remember reading your results posts last year from October onwards, as I had my first procedure in December, and it's been great to follow. Been a great read and I look forward to following more of your progress. For the record, your results are already top notch and I'm sure the small touch up will knock it even further out of the park. Anyways, it was a pleasure meeting your brother and I wish you both the very best. Thanks for posting!

It would be interesting to see if the scientists studying it for more 'mainstream' purposes are intending to trial some scar revisions. I imagine the clinical utility of being able to minimise the appearance of prominent scars with more 'normal' skin and associated structures would be a major advancement for doctors, patients, and medical science in general. This would, in theory, spill over to our hair restoration interests too. Keen to see what the future holds, but I for one have been intrigued with these trials for over a year on this thread along with many other members on here. Here's to whatever the future holds!

Does anyone know when we can expect updates from Dr. Bloxham?

Have you heard about Dr Bloxham's FUT trial with Verteporfin in the US? He injected it on 3 patients who underwent FUT and said he'd document progress on his YouTube channel. Exciting stuff

@Gatsby Your story is an inspiration for hair loss sufferers far and wide. Do you ever look at the pictures of you, slick bald norwood 6, and compare it to your hair today, and smile at how far you've come? I'm also an individual who had a HT at age 18 at a hairmill (big mistake, I know), but now I'm in my mid 20s and have been on dutasteride for 2 years and have had a HT repair from one of Europe's best surgeons. It's not perfect and I'm having a touch up in November, but I know that I would be slick bald now without medical therapy and the HT intervention. Thanks Adrian, for being so open. You've helped me to not feel so guilty and ashamed about having a HT at 18, which I regret so much even to this day.

Thanks @Melvin- Moderator Please can you ask Dr. Longaker what he sees may be the potential widestream uses of verteporfin one day? Like, what does he see as the potential outcome of his research? Reducing scars in surgery, scar revision, regrowing normal skin structures i.e. sweat glands/hair follicles?

Very encouraging to see Dr Bloxham trialling this. He seems very informed on the treatment and very enthusiastic, which is a positive. What do people see as the potential outcome of these trials? If verteporfin proves successful at either minimising scarring or regrowing hair (or both), do you think it may eventually be used off label in hair transplants, given that it is an FDA approved drug with safety data backing it up? I appreciate there is a long way to go and many other hyped treatments have flopped, but the trialling is necessary with this drug I think to really understand its potential uses

x3! Been an interesting one to follow, bet the hair's looking awesome now

This whole journey has been nothing short of inspirational, start to finish. I remember first hearing your story on Baldcafe's channel, and to see you now is so damn satisfying. Thanks for sharing the highs and lows of hairloss in its raw and often heartbreaking form, glad this is the outcome and we're not even past 2 months of the 2nd procedure yet

Filling in nicely! I had 2202 grafts with Lorenzo, and I'm about 77 days in so this has been a good progression for me to see. Thanks for the update

Do you think it’s worth putting some guidance on sourcing verteporfin (including rough costs) and some details for the protocol that Dr Bargouthi is using in this document? Or should we just direct HT surgeons to Dr Barghouthi for these questions?

Possibly, but what if you were on finasteride or dutasteride?

Does anyone know of any other examples of scar revisions using verteporfin? Hopefully cases like this (albeit not 100% scientific) inspire Dr B and other HT surgeons to trial the drug on existing HT scars

1. This is a verteporfin thread 2. This is a mice study with no human results 3. Assuming this works in humans, it is at least 5 years away. Verteporfin is here now

At present, this doesn't seem to be known/very well understood. The theory (and what has been happening in practice) is that verteporfin will block the usual scarring pathways when wounds are created which generate collagen rich, inelastic skin without sweat glands or hair follicles. In it's place, normal healthy skin seems to be regenerating. What is yet to be seen and researched is whether excising an existing scar (e.g., an FUT scar or an FUE scar) and then injecting verteporfin will cause the wound to heal like normal skin including with sweat glands and hair follicles. It would be interesting to see if the body 'remembers' what was there originally from birth in the DNA and regenerates back the skin to that, with hair follicles, or if it just comes back as scar tissue as that was there before the excision took place for the verteporfin to be injected. This is a priority area for research as there are many that have bodged donor areas, keloid scars they want to try and improve, or just over harvested donor areas in general. Alternatively, some have suggested that one way of improving FUE/FUT scars could be to extract normal hairs grafts from elsewhere in the donor area, inject the excisions with verteporfin and implant these hairs into the scars. The scars will have more hair coverage, and the new FU extractions should regenerate with hair and more normal skin than scar tissue.