Research

As people age, most people suffer from some sort of hair loss, especially males. Specifically, there is a condition called alopecia areata which is when the immune system attacks the hair follicle causing hair loss in bald patches. This is a prominent condition that affects about 150 million people worldwide.

With so many people affected by this condition, there are not many treatments to prevent or treat hair loss. For example, here are some of the current solutions to hair loss. Rogaine and Propecia are the only drugs approved by the FDA to treat baldness. Rogaine is a drug that needs to be taken twice a day and will only work on people who have alopecia. Its targeted to help promote hair growth, but even after taking this drug, there is only a 60% chance of success. Propecia on the other hand is taken regularly to stop or slow hair loss. However, the issue with these solutions they only temporarily slow down hair loss, because once you stop taking the drugs, the hair loss will resume.

There are, however, hair transplants, but these are very invasive because they make you pluck individual hairs from your scalp and then insert each one back in in a balding area and require a long recovery time. And the main issue with this is a lot of patients do not have enough hair for this.

Therefore, Dr. Terskikh's Lab has found an alternative solution which is aimed to find a less invasive hair transplantation by using human pluripotent stem cells to initiate human hair growth. This lab was able to find a procedure to coax these human pluripotent cells to become dermal papilla cells, in which these cells are able to induce hair growth when transplanted into mice. The benefit to this is that it is not as invasive, its permanent, and you don’t need to have a lot of hair.