Hello Only Natural,
First I would like to say that for several months we have experimented formulating with the apple stem cells extract you mentioned, and that we are going to offer the ingredient in The Formulator in the near future.
Second, the article you present is an internal article conducted and presented by the company which makes the stem cells extract, and although that by itself is not a diminishing factor, there is a diminishing factor in that they did not differentiate between the stem cells’ effect and the effect of the culture media in which the stem cells were grown. Tissue culture media is loaded with nutrients and growth factors and so is the media in which the stem cells are grown. A competent experiment would attempt to differentiate between the respective effects of the growth media and the stem cells. The material they tested (and which we also used for testing the possibilities in formulating stem cells extract) is a combination of stem cells and their culture media. Therefore, they did not exclude the possibility that the effects are due to the culture media in which the stem cells were grown rather than the stem cells themselves. One other control that they did not conduct is to see whether effects of H
2O
2 (hydrogen peroxide) could be alleviated by other anti-oxidants. If the stem cells act primarily as anti-oxidants, it’s good, nice, important, but nothing really special that cannot be achieved with other more powerful and inexpensive anti-oxidants.
Over half a century ago it was established that cells in culture have a limited number of divisions they can undergo. Many of the early important studies in the field were conducted by Leonard Hayflich. Tissue culture models of aging are still problematic when compared to actual aging, but some models are more suitable than others in studying different aspects of aging. The terms “apoptosis” and “senescence” are used generically in the study and may have nothing to do with actual apoptosis or senescence. You see, when you poison cells with powerful oxidants you damage them or kill them. If someone gets hit by a 10 pound hammer on the head he is seriously injured, which is not the same as undergoing accelerated “senescence”. He may also die of the injuries, which does not mean he undergoes “apoptosis”. The generic use of these terms does not reflect actual apoptosis or senescence but is rather an attempt to link between a product’s activity and some of the “big issues” in biology.
Growth of follicles and their ability to recover outside a poorly-supporting scalp has been proven to be a solid fact. I discussed that at length in answering questions at the “hairsite” forum regarding an experiment where human scalp hair from balding regions recovered after implantation into nude mice skin
http://www.hairsite.com/hair-loss/forum_entry-id-50700.html and supplemented in
http://www.hairsite.com/hair-loss/forum_entry-id-51409.html. Tissue culture is not as accommodating as the mice skin and will accommodate follicle growth for about 11-18 days depending on which culture media is used and other conditions. The person or company which will succeed in patenting a culture medium in which follicles can grow for a long time, say, several months, may get into significant financial benefits as a result. The 2 days extension in follicles’ growth in media is indeed significant but not significant ‘enough to exclude the possibility (a very strong possibility) that it is a result of the variation in the media (adding plant tissue culture media into the follicle growth media). In addition, this extension of growth is not outside current variables of growth in different follicle growing settings. Moreover, there was no mention that stem cells within the follicle were stimulated and that there is a connection between that effect and the increase of “culture time” growth for the follicles. Indeed, if the time extension was due to stem cell stimulation and differentiation and growth, we would expect a much longer time effect. The growth medium of the follicles is a time-limiting factor and the apple stem cells medium (with the stem cells) is improving the original growth medium accommodation. That is most likely what happens, an improvement of the growth medium rather than an intrinsic change such as stimulation of follicle stem cells. In a work I did in the late seventies on beating heart cells in culture (rat heart cells in culture beat at a high rate for 7 days and then the rate is slowed until at 14 days in culture they stop beating), I succeeded in recovering the “young” high rate beating of 14 days cultured heart cells by changing their membrane lipid composition with small phosphatidylcholine liposomes. You can read about that in
“Yechiel, E., and Y. Barenholz. 1985. Relationships between membrane lipid composition and biological properties of rat myocytes. J. Biol. Chem. 260:9123-9131”. This was an example of reversing “culture aging” and the experiment was also conducted on whole animals reversing many age-related changed in old rats. You can read about it in
”1989, 'Lipid Replacement Therapy', for treatment of age-related disorders. U.S.A. Patent No. 4,812,314”.
In conclusion, I don’t see a negative reason (why not to use the material) and there are encouraging good reasons for using it, whether or not they have anything to do with the stem cells themselves. The high cost of the material is a problem when you compare it to possible benefits, and it may not be cost effective to be used in commercial batches before there is an adequate number of customers who may wish to purchase the product. Our operation with The Formulator is on the other hand a valid option for people who wish to try ingredients without a commitment on our side for producing large expensive batches which may not have a sufficient customer base.
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