Male-pattern hair loss affects 80% of men at some point in their lifetime (and female-pattern hair loss affects half of all women over the age of 70). But, “until recently, we knew remarkably little about how to slow, halt and reverse its seemingly inevitable onset”, said Tom Howarth on BBC Science Focus.
For all the recent messaging about “body positivity”, the search for a balding “fix” has become “increasingly desperate – and financially lucrative”, said Esquire. The hair-loss industry is well on track to be worth £9 billion by 2030.
An “early frontrunner” is hair cloning, added Howarth on BBC Science Focus. Also known as hair multiplication, it’s a form of “hair banking”: before baldness hits, healthy hair follicles are extracted from your scalp and cryogenically frozen; once hair-thinning starts, these follicles are taken to a lab and the skin cells around them are isolated and multiplied.
Meanwhile, in Japan, researchers are having success with their quest to grow hair follicles from scratch in a lab. But the “big one” is a drug called PP405, developed by US pharmaceutical company Pelage, said Lane Brown in New York Magazine. “We were blown away,” Qing Yu Christina Weng, Pelage’s chief medical officer, told the magazine. After four weeks of applying the drug as a topical gel, not only were the treatment group “growing new hair where there wasn’t any before ... it wasn’t peach fuzz or baby hair – it was proper, thick, terminal hair”.
If the drug lives up to this initial hype, its potential is obvious. “After decades of snake oil and broken promises,” it feels as though “the end of baldness” is within sight, said Brown. Call it “the faint stubble of hope”. |
