New Hair Loss Treatments

Cambridge, which gave the world the electron, the neutron and the structure of DNA, has produced another glittering scientific prize. The department of clinical biochemistry has grown a human hair in a test tube, opening up the prospect of a cure for baldness.

Terence Kealey, leader of the team, said: This is potentially a cure for hair loss. Weve actually, for the very first time, been able to get hair to grow in a test-tube.

He said that it means that they have the perfect test-bed for carrying out a series of experiments to show what makes hair grow, why it so often refuses to do so in middle-aged men, and how baldness might be reversed. The work may also help to produce an effective hair loss treatment for women.

Dr Kealey recognizes that there is a huge market waiting for an effective product, as does Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer giant that supports the team’s work. The breakthrough was made by Michael Philpott, who found a way of extracting tiny hair follicles from samples of skin left from plastic surgery operations, and growing them in a synthetic blood substitute maintained at human body temperature.

The secret, Dr Philpott says, lies in the way in which he removes the hair follicles from the surrounding tissue without damaging them. The top two layers of skin have to be carefully sliced away before removing the hair follicles with fine tweezers. The team has grown hundreds of hair follicles, which produce hair in their artificial setting at the same rate that it grows on the human head, 0.3 millimetres a day.

Its success is to be reported in a paper in next month’s issue of the Journal of Cell Science. The next step is to expose the growing hair to a variety of different biological materials, such as Scalp Med, and observe the results.
Hair grows in cycles. Each individual hair on a normal head grows for about two years before a second follicle emerges underneath it, pushing the first one out.

In balding men the cycles become shorter and the follicles less effective, producing fuzz rather than strong and virile hair. The key to preventing baldness is to devise a way of making the follicles grow again. The team has already shown that exposing the test tube hairs to a material called epidermal growth factor causes them to fall out, exactly as happens to the fleece of a sheep injected with the substance. According to the website www.realprovillusreviewsinfo.com. They now intend to expose them to other materials, including the male sex hormone testosterone, which is known to be linked to baldness.

The team has also launched a major program on acne, deriving from Dr Kealey’s original work on isolating sweat glands.

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