Hair Loss Developments (cont)

Products like Propecia and Rogaine certainly offer the best hope that there has been to halt the hair loss process. At the very least, these products offer hair loss sufferers a ‘stay-of-execution’ in that they promise to help keep your hair longer. With new advancements being made daily, this might be all you need to keep your hair until further advancements are made. At the very least halting the hair loss process will give you a chance to decide how, or if, you want to proceed further with hair loss treatments. It’s certainly a point worth considering if you are contemplating a hair transplant or any similar surgical or non-reversible procedure – will you be able to take advantage of advancements around the corner if you go ahead with surgery today? One thing to remember is that Propecia started life as a drug to shrink the Prostate and ended up as a multi-billion dollar hair loss drug. Pharmaceutical companies all around the world are sitting on patented drugs that didn’t live up to their original expectations for a particular use and are being re-examined for other medical possibilities including hair loss. The race is on for a hair loss cure like no other time before us, so the prospects are encouraging.


So what might the future hold?

Undoubtedly there will be refinements on the drugs Propecia and Rogaine, and there are likely to be other products coming on the market to rival their success. Undoubtedly hair transplants will get even better in quality and cheaper in cost and should become more widely accepted as more males choose this option, but looking even further ahead gene therapy and cloning look to be strong contenders for the ultimate in hair loss treatment and are generating much discussion amongst hair loss sufferers.

Gene therapy is already causing much excitement in the field of medicine, right across the board, and as the pain-staking process of mapping the human genome and analyzing the results continues new breakthroughs are announced almost daily. The exact gene, or genes (as it’s believed that more than one gene may be responsible for male pattern baldness), that are responsible for triggering hair loss are not yet identified (at least not in full), however the concept of being able to manipulate the sensitivity of the hair follicle to DHT through gene therapy is certainly a viable option and may well eliminate baldness altogether.

Perhaps in the interim though ‘hair farming’ might provide the answer. The ability to clone and create hairs in a test tube is already with us, however the results have been varied with the quality and life expectancy of the cloned hair extremely variable. Cell farming on the other hand looks to hold more promise. This procedure involves taking a small sample of balding-resistant hair, normally from the back of the scalp, where the hair is not susceptible to male pattern baldness. As a donor area, very little of the scalp is removed. From there the cells are separated and removed, cultured and grown in a petri dish where they multiply by the thousands. Basically, as many cells as are required can be grown and then inserted back into the patients scalp where, within a short period of time, a hair follicle will begin to grow. Some time after that a normal hair shaft will start to grow. This will effectively mean that there are unlimited donor cells that can be harvested which in turn means there are unlimited hair follicles that can be transplanted. The actual operation time is reduced dramatically and therefore, one would assume, the cost. In addition to this, the physical scarring that often accompanies hair transplants today will be reduced dramatically. The downside at the moment is while growing a hair in a petri dish is one thing, transplanting the cell and getting it to grow is something else. Apparently it is almost the same thing in getting a hair cell to regrow, as it is a limb or an organ – and this is the area that eludes scientists and researchers at the moment. One encouraging aspect however from the point of view of someone suffering from hair loss is that this is the one area that many researchers and scientists have decided offers the best chance of curing hair loss (and many other ailments). As a result there are many, many organisations and companies around the world racing to be the first to perfect the technology and it seems no money is being spared in an effort to be the first. As always however, it is still viewed as years away before such technology is available on the market – and this is assuming the technology doesn’t get bogged down with lengthy court cases over patents and other intellectual property rights from the various organisations working on these techniques. Taking a leap into the future, once this technology is perfected, many people predict there will be such things as ‘hair banks’ where donors of all sorts can donate hair cells. Patients will be able to choose exactly the kind of hair that they wish to have, and it needn’t be restricted to people with hair loss. Anyone wanting to change their hair colour or style could simply have their new hair transplanted in.