This is the New Frontier of Hair Growth Treatment
There is a new way to promote hair growth, but it’s not on the market yet. (Photo: Stocksy)
There are expensive transplants, wigs, topical treatments, ingestibles, and even promising stem cells on the market all promising to combat hair loss and reinvigorate hair growth, but scientists at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered that blocking the enzymes in hair follicles actually work. The study, published last week in Science Advances, and was led by Angela Christiano, PhD, a professor of dermatology at Columbia.
“The work that we’re reporting in this paper was really an unexpected discovery,” Christiano explains in a video released by the university. Last year, they were doing research on the treatment of alopecia areata, an autoimmune diseases that causes hair loss, using Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, a type of medication that block the activity of Janus kinases enzymes and control cell growth. “JAK inhibitors are a class of drugs that block signaling pathways in the hair follicle. In the resting stage of the hair cycle, JAK signaling is elevated, and in the growing stage, it is lower,” Christiano explains to Yahoo Beauty. “JAK inhibitors seem to activate the hair cycle by blocking the signaling that keeps the hair in the resting state, and thereby allowing it to enter the growth stage.” She notes that there are potential side effects when given systematically, including immunosuppression, drop in blood counts, potentially risk of cancer, and infection.
“We noticed and were quite surprised that when we used the drugs topically, the mice regrew their hair,” Christiano adds in the video. They realized that the topically-applied drugs might be restoring hair growth directly instead of just acting on the immune cells. Christiano and her team then decided to pivot into studying the hair cycle of mice and humans in general. “We were really looking to study the impact of these drugs on activating stem cells in the hair follicle.” Turns out, the drugs actually activate the beginnings of hair growth. “This is a very unusual effect and there aren’t many drugs that are known to be able to do that,” says Christiano. The research team delved further into the study and discovered that the drug has potential for human hair growth, too.
“That opens up the possibility of treatment of a wide variety of hair disorders,” says Christiano. “Not simply male pattern or female pattern hair loss, but another group of disorders.” These hair loss disorders include chemotherapy and alopecia. Christiano notes at the end of the video that none of these similar discoveries have made it onto the market as a viable product yet, and now this new treatment would open up a new class of drugs. “A lot of work still has to be done,” she says, noting before drugs can be FDA-approved and available to consumers, extensive testing needs to be conducted on humans. “There have been very few innovations in drug development for hair loss disorders in recent years, due mainly to challenges in research, such as lack of animal models for androgenetic alopecia and the inability to grow hair in vitro.”
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