All content credit due to our forum member hellouser for putting all the painstaking time and effort into attending the conference, and gathering all the audio and video content presented here.
9th World Congress for Hair Research 2015 – Miami, FL
Dr. Annika Vogt’s presentation is below (and above). This presentation covers the following topics:
An analysis of the chemical, structural, and functional differences between scalp that has already endured hair loss, versus unaffected scalp. Also the establishment of new processes for doing this type of research was covered.
The need to understand the causes of the “disease process” in hair loss is of primary importance. Current methods for examining various aspects of the hair follicle functioning and how it is affected by Androgenetic and other Alopecia’s are inefficient. Likewise, being able to test whether a treatment works efficiently is difficult due to the need for multiple facets of the testing process, including hair counts, biopsies, and other inconvenient, manual steps.
Novel methods were discussed for examining the effectiveness of topical treatments for hair loss, including Optical Coherence Tomography, experimental methods, readouts, and molecular processes. An initial trial of 6 and then 12 individuals was conducted to run these analysis methods on the effectiveness of Minoxidil. The approach was to use RNA markers which they hoped to find consistent across multiple patients, which could be monitored as a new standard in future clinical trials. The ability to collect hair samples from patients in a non-invasive way that could be used in future trials was also examined.
We encourage you to follow along with the video, and discuss this presentation with others in our forums:
Dr. Annika Vogt – Differences Between Affected and Clinically Non-Affected Scalp
Speaker: We’ll change a little bit from the order that was presented in the agenda, and we’ll have our next speaker, and then we’ll take some questions. Then we’ll have our remaining speakers who are going to take some more questions. So if we can have the next presentation. Our next speaker is Dr. Annika Vogt. She’s a senior physician at the Hair Competence Center and Pediatric Dermatology unit, as well as the Scientific Director of the Experimental & Translational Research on the Department of Dermatology at Charité-University of Medicine in Germany. She is also a faculty member in Paris at the University of Pierre et Marie Curie. So Dr. Vogt.
Dr. Vogt: We are very pleased to see that our session attracted so many participants. After this very impressive and exciting talk, we are now shifting more towards clinical focus and trying to understand a little bit of the disease process. And I think we already illustrated very nicely that it’s complex to understand this organ, and see how we can play with the organ to really reach a level where we don’t focus on only one facet, and are really able to regenerate, in this case, hair follicles or, in our case, to really understand the disease and also the drug action.
I will now talk a little bit about protocols we developed in our lab to improve the way we conduct our clinical trials and also speed up our readouts. And I have to say that a lot of the work I’m presenting now is part of an investigative initiated research project, where we received funding from Johnson & Johnson.
But the starting point, I mean, those who have been following my work over the past years know that I’m mostly interested in targeted drug delivery and packaging target active molecules to create in other ways photonic dermatotherapy. So we found ourselves in a position where we felt that it’s really hard to have fast screenings of novel compounds and also novel formulations. And also like when it comes to studying the molecular processes and identifying novel targets, we can only always look from the very specific questions.
What we want to see is the whole disease process at the follicle, but there we really rely on the patient biopsies. So this limits the way or the things we can do with our patients because we are not free to take biopsies in as many numbers as we want, and it’s not that cosmetically accepted. Like we have scarring alopecia, for example. People are not very happy to have [inaudible] scars after a clinical trial. So we do a lot of work on organ cultures. And with the cell culture, we can prove certain signaling pathways and certain questions. But it would be really nice if we could add molecular markers to our current understanding of what we see in the clinical trials.
Because the typical situation is that what we have – and over here will focus on androgenetic alopecia – as a typical situation for a drug efficacy trials. You will see here a male patient. And what we usually want to look at is those who participated in our Ulrike’s session this morning, we are now able to do mini-zone trials. We have certain areas we want to focus on, but then we still have the situation that we have to wait for many weeks to sit there and have global expert panels and negotiate numbers of hair follicles and micrometers of thickness. And so we felt that we wanted to look at different ways of improving the way we do these trials.
So we designed a set-up where we wanted to get ready to have efficient androgenetic or testing of topical treatments for androgenetic alopecia. And we felt that we wanted to look at frontal, vertex, and occiput using the clinical methods: adding to our panel things like optical coherence tomography (I will show in a minute) and adding experimental methods and readouts that will tell us a little bit about the scalp/skin milieu, which is really hard to mimic in vitro, and also molecular processes. And I will now guide you a little bit through those complex studies set-up that we created and tested in six individuals, until we then repeated the whole procedure in 12 individuals and monitored the effectiveness of minoxidil treatments, as Ulrike presented this morning.
So we were trying to generate protein material that helps us to look at scalp milieu, and we decided to look at RNA material from plucked hair follicles. Because if you pluck the hair follicles and there’s [inaudible] – and we also had discussions – of course, you don’t remove these entire compartments, but it would be so nice to be able to pluck hair follicles, get a molecular readout, and then, over time, go back to the same area or, at the same time, look at different sites to get a more comprehensive view of what’s going on with this patient. So the idea was to look if we can generate robust RNA microarray data that allows us to set up a panel of selected molecular markers that we could then use in multiple upcoming trials.
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