More Women Seeking Treatment for Hair Loss

A new survey by the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery has found that more and more women are seeking treatment for hair loss than ever before and that a majority of patients, 61%, believe that hair cloning is the “next big thing” in hair restoration technologies. Hair cloning is an experimental procedure for treating hair loss by harvesting cells from a patient’s scalp in much the same manner as follicular grafts are currently obtained and to then grow and expand those cells in tissue culture conditions to produce more hair-forming cells.

The survey found that, despite the poor economy, the number of hair restoration patients worldwide has increased 26% over the past two years to approximately 811,363. Of those, roughly three quarters or 574,894 people sought non-surgical treatments with 236,468 patients elected for hair transplantation surgery.

“People around the world place an extremely high value on their hair, so it is no surprise that the number of men and women seeking help for hair loss continues to increase each year,” said William M. Parsley, MD, president of the ISHRS. “Thanks to the continual refinements in hair restoration surgery and proven medical therapies that together produce natural-looking results, more people are investing in restoring their hair for both the personal and professional advantages inherent with looking younger and feeling more self-confident.”

The survey also found that, although the majority of hair restoration patients are men, the percentage of women seeking help for hair loss appears to be on the rise. Since the Practice Census was first conducted in 2005, the percent of hair restoration surgical patients who were female increased from 11.4 percent in 2004 to 13.8 percent in 2006 and 15.1 percent in 2008. Similarly, the percent of female non-surgical hair restoration patients has also increased — from 28.3 percent to 31.8 percent over the four-year period.

The survey also found that people of all different ages were seeking hair restoration surgery in 2008. For example, ISHRS members reported that the average age of their patients who underwent hair restoration surgery for the first time in 2008 was 38 years old. When asked the age of their youngest and oldest patients in 2008, the average age of the youngest hair restoration patient at ISHRS member practices in 2008 was 22 years old. On the other end of the spectrum, the average age of the oldest hair restoration patient at ISHRS member practices in 2008 was 69 years old. More than half of male and female patients fell between the ages of 30 to 49 years old (59.6 percent and 54.9 percent, respectively), and, on average, male patients tended to be slightly younger than female patients.

When ISHRS members were asked the average number of procedures each patient received in order to achieve the desired result, less procedures continued to be the trend in 2008. Specifically, 1.4 procedures were required in 2008 versus 1.8 procedures in 2006 and 2.2 procedures in 2004. Dr. Parsley credits technological advancements and the latest techniques that allow hair restoration physicians to discretely implant more tiny grafts in one session for the continual decline in the number of procedures needed for optimal results.

Similar to how other cosmetic procedures were once considered taboo to discuss, hair restoration surgery is now a mainstream procedure that patients are willing to talk about openly with others. For example, ISHRS members were asked if their patients were more likely, just as likely or less likely to discuss their hair restoration procedures with family and friends in 2008 compared to 2006. The survey found that approximately half (49 percent) of ISHRS members said their patients would be ‘more likely’ to discuss their hair restoration as they were in 2006, with 44.2 percent reporting patients as ‘just as likely’ and only 6.7 percent as ‘less likely’ to discuss.

When examining the number of hair restoration procedures by recipient area and by country/region, the scalp, eyebrow and face were the three most popular transplant areas. However, a number of other interesting trends were observed in 2008. These include:

– The Middle East experienced the biggest increase in the number of hair
restoration procedures, with 20,647 procedures performed in 2008 (a 68
percent increase from 2006).
– In the Middle East, the number of facial (moustache/beard) hair
transplants increased by 110 percent from 2006 to 2008 (436 procedures vs.
916 procedures, respectively).
– In Asia, the demand for chest hair transplants rose by 184 percent
from 2006 to 2008 (77 procedures vs. 219 procedures, respectively).
– In Europe, the number of eyelash transplants increased by 631 percent
from 2006 to 2008 (35 procedures vs. 256 procedures, respectively).
– In Europe, eyebrow transplants also increased by 297 percent from 2006
to 2008 (719 procedures vs. 2,861 procedures, respectively).

“Although these exciting technologies are still several years away from being available to hair loss patients, a number of clinical trials have already begun to explore this possibility,” said Dr. Parsley. “Clearly, our survey shows that people are not willing to simply accept their hair loss and are increasingly turning to hair restoration procedures as a permanent solution. As more new technologies become available in the future, I expect this trend will continue.”

About the ISHRS

Founded in 1993, the ISHRS is a non-profit medical association dedicated to the advancement of the art and science of hair restoration. With a membership of over 750 physicians worldwide, the ISHRS provides continuing medical education to physicians specializing in hair loss and restoration surgery and serves as a resource for the public on the latest medical and surgical hair restoration treatments for hair loss. For more information and to locate a physician, visit www.ishrs.org.

Aussie Docs Working on Hair Cloning Project

The Brisbane Times is reporting that a team of Australian scientists in Melbourne is aggressively seeking to develop a realistic approach to hair cloning using adult stem cells. Writing in the paper’s June 14th issue, reporter Stephen Cauchi said that three scientists at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne and Melbourne University are attempting to extract adult stem cells from hair follicles and coax them into multiplying in petri dishes. The effort is led by the hospital’s dermatology director, Rod Sinclair.

“We’ve now got three stem cell scientists in our department working on hair follicle stem cells,” the paper quoted Professor Sinclair as saying.

Sinclair also was frank in his estimation of just how preliminary are the results of experimental hair cloning. According to the scientist, the dream of growing massive amounts of a person’s own hair in a laboratory is still a bit of a ways off.

Here’s how reporter Cauchi characterized the current state of research:

Professor Sinclair said the stem cells were extracted from the base of the hair follicle. “You can dissect out a tiny ball of about 3000 cells. If you put that ball into a culture dish that ball will flatten out into a thin sheet of cells.”

Ideally, that sheet of cells should “aggregate to form new balls [so] you can take out those balls and reimplant them to form new hairs.” But the sheet of cells was producing one ball instead of many, he said.

“The state of play at the moment is that I can cut some hairs off the back of your head, grow them in culture, and get enough back to replace the hairs that I took from the back of your head. We can’t amplify them to produce more hairs. That’s the problem.”

According to Cauchi, the other main problem facing the hair cloning scientist is the task of actually implanting the newly grown baby hair follicles. “You have to put the stem cells in a scaffold, insert the scaffold into the skin, the scaffold makes the hair follicle grow in the right orientation and direction, and then disintegrates,” Sinclair told him. “Growing a hair is not enough. You want one that grows in the right direction with the right colour and curl and wave so that it looks natural.”

Sinclair also commented on what the Australian team’s research reveals about other efforts to develop a realistic hair cloning technology — particuarly that of the British company, Intercytex. Sinclair said that Intercytex’s approach is very similar to what the Aussies are doing. But, he added, “I think they have a lot of problems trying to get the cells to reaggregate.”

To read the original article in the Brisbane Times, click here.

Aderans’s “tissue engineering” approach to hair loss

Aderans Research Institute, Inc. (ARI) is one of a handful of companies racing to develop a realistic treatment for hair loss based on the cultivation of hair follicle cells.  At the recent  BIO International Convention held in late May in Atlanta, the company’s spokesmen described Aderans’s quest to perfect state-of-the-art cell-based hair regeneration technologies for men and women.

“Our research is focused on generating a tissue engineering solution to the regeneration of hair,” said Kurt Stenn, MD, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at ARI. “We’re using the hair cells from hair follicles and researching methods to promote their growth in controlled laboratory environments. If successful, we’ll then be able to recombine the cells and restore them to the scalp, where they would ultimately elicit hair growth.”


Co-located in Atlanta and Philadelphia, Aderans is actively engaged in the study of state-of-the-art cell-based hair regeneration for men and women. The company recently launched Phase 2 of its clinical study to assess the impact of its regenerative cell treatment on pattern hair loss, also known as androgenetic alopecia. Phase 2 of the study is being conducted in six U.S. cities: Atlanta, Boston, New York, Raleigh, Houston, and Washington DC. Phase 1 was conducted exclusively in the United Kingdom.

“The second phase of this study is another step in our efforts to truly understand the impact of
regenerative cell therapy on pattern hair loss. It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said Stenn. The company’s research is focused on on taking actual hair cells — technically known as fibroblasts and keratinocytes, the two primary cell types within hair follicles—and promoting their growth in controlled laboratory environments. The research teams then recombine them and these “combined hair cells” are then placed in the patient’s skin, where they are expected to elicit hair growth.

To see a brief video of Aderans’s approach, click here.

Some experts believe that this sort of cell treatment, or “tissue engineering,” represents a major advance on traditional hair transplant procedures, promising to overcome a key limitation of conventional transplantation: a finite hair supply for any one person.

Through cell engineering, Aderans Research is attempting to develop technologies that will allow doctors to multiply existing hair cells capable of eliciting hair growth, providing patients with a comprehensive solution to hair loss regardless of the quantity of their existing hair.

Aderans Research Institute is a subsidiary of Aderans Company, Ltd, the world’s largest wig manufacturer, and an affiliate of Bosley, a global leader in medical hair restoration.

Scientists Discover “Signal” That Turns Hair Growth Cells Back On

Science Daily reports that scientists from Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Institute have identified the signaling molecule that ratchets up and clamps down the activity of key genes in dermal papilla, a type of skin cell whose unique collection of proteins ultimately instruct epithelial stem cells to make hair.

The research, which was published in Genes & Development, highlights how this signaling molecule, a protein called BMP, is crucial for the future reprogramming of hair follicles.

Epithelial stem cells nest in the upper portion of the adult hair follicle, and dermal papilla reside nearby in the mesenchymal layer below them. It is thought that the communication signals between the two cell types instruct the stem cells to form hair follicles during embryogenesis, and then, when these follicles have matured, regulate their cycles of hair growth and regeneration.

“Scientists don’t know how dermal papilla cells are programmed to provide the instructive signals to stem cells, but now we know that BMP signals play a crucial role,” says Michael Rendl, who conducted this work while he was a postdoc in Elaine Fuchs’s Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development.

For several years, it has been known that BMP signaling must be reduced in order to activate follicle stem cells. “Michael has now uncovered a new twist to the story,” says Fuchs, who is Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor at Rockefeller and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, “namely that dermal papilla cells appear to receive BMP signals from their surrounding microenvironment and this signaling is required for these two cell types to maintain cross talk.”

Fuchs conducted the study with Rendl, who found that BMP6, a member of the BMP family of proteins, orchestrates dermal papilla’s signature genes to turn on and off, thereby giving these skin cells their unique collection of proteins and features.

Fuchs’s team developed a clever strategy to delete several genes in vitro, ones that encode for the receptor onto which several BMPs bind. They then grafted these genetically engineered dermal papilla cells onto the backs of bald mice to see if these mice would grow hair.

Well, the mice didn’t. When dermal papilla cells lacked this receptor, their signature proteins were not expressed and the key signaling that occurs between epithelial stem cells and dermal papilla was impaired. Without this exchange, the hair follicles did not grow or make hair.

Nearly all of the signature proteins that Rendl and Fuchs tested in dermal papilla cells decreased when they deleted the BMP receptor. The exception: BMP6 itself. This increase in BMP6 expression levels suggests that BMP6 is necessary for both locking in dermal papilla’s molecular identity as well as maintaining the crosstalk that allows stem cells to receive hair-inducing signals, but it itself is not the signal that stem cells await. This finding also provides clues to the type of signals that follicle stem cells may send to dermal papilla.

What’s more, BMP6 specifically maintains the molecular identity of dermal papilla cells. When Rendl and Fuchs induced the BMP pathway in other cell types that respond to BMP signaling, they found that these cells continue to produce the normal amount of their signature proteins. “This was really interesting,” says Rendl. “It is likely the case that different signaling pathways, or a combination of them, regulate different sets of genes to give each cell type in the hair follicle its characteristic properties.”

Fuchs speculates that “this complex circuitry in BMP signaling may set the foundations for a BMP regulatory clock that drives the hair cycle. If so, we may be one step closer to unlocking nature’s secrets to hair growth.”

This research was supported in part by the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative, a collaborative program of three New York City biomedical research institutions — Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical College.

Intercytex Phase II Trials Prove Hair Cloning Now Possible

One of the more discouraging aspects of Intercytex’s financial struggles is that their results are so promising. We now know that the Phase II clinical study of Intercytex’s pioneering work in hair cloning techologies has been a tremendous success. The study was conducted by Dr Bessam Farjo in Manchester, UK, and involved the removal of dermal papilla cells from a patient, the multiplication of those cells in a lab, and then the re-insertion of those cells on the patient’s scalp. Dermal papilla cells are cells at the base of a hair follicle that help make keratin, the tough, fibrous, insoluble protein out of which hair is made.


In simple language: The scientists are attempting to grow limitless amounts of a patient’s own hair follicles in a lab and then “re-seed” a bald head with them. This overcomes the inherent limitations of even advanced transplantation techniques — which is the limited number of hairs available from a patient’s head to transplant.

On his website, Dr. Farjo summarized the results of this exciting clinical trial. As you can see, the results are very encouraging.

This trial was designed to examine the effect of different DP [dermal papilla] delivery techniques and methods to ensure that the epidermal cells were in the correct state to respond to the signals and produce new hairs.

In this study, subjects were injected 900 times with 1µl aliquots of DP cells in a large area which was photographed at the end of the study. Subjects were also injected in a smaller area, divided into two sections - counts were obtained by shaving and photographing the two small sections of scalp, injecting them multiple times (either 1 injection of 50 µl or 50 injections of 1 µl) with living DP cell suspension and then applying a specialised image analysis system to provide a total hair count. In these small sections, all 19 subjects in the trial were treated using a range of injection and scalp pre-stimulation techniques; the first 6 subjects were injected without stimulation of the scalp. In the remaining 13 subjects the resident hair producing (epithelial) cells were stimulated at the time of delivery of the DP cells in one of the two treatment sites.

13 subjects completed the 48-week trial with 6 subjects lost to follow-up. Of the 13 subjects completing the trial the data showed that:

65% (11/17) of the treated sites in the non-stimulated group responded to the treatment by increasing numbers of hairs of all sizes

71% (12/17) of the treated sites in the non-stimulated group responded to the treatment by increasing numbers of hairs over 30 micron in diameter

78% (7/9) of the treated sites in the stimulated group responded to the treatment by increasing numbers of hairs of all sizes

100% (9/9) of the treated sites in the stimulated group responded to the treatment by increasing numbers of hairs over 30 micron in diameter

The overall take rate (number of hairs produced per 100 injections) in the stimulated areas was

o 40% (n=6) for hairs of all sizes

o 18% (n=6) for hairs over 30 micron in diameter

The larger (900 injection) area photographs have not yet been analysed.

These data are consistent with the interim data reported last September and further confirm the hypothesis that new hair production is improved by pre-stimulation of the scalp, leading to an interaction between the injected cells and the resident hair producing cells.

Aderans, Intercytex and the New Science of Hair Growth and Hair Cloning

The solutions to hair loss are changing rapidly. Plus, some amazing reporting is being done of Aderans Research, Intercytex and the new hair growth technologies. One of the best summaries of the current state of the research — at least that we’ve seen recently — can be found at BestLife.com.

Here are some of the excerpts.

Brandishing a syringe the size of a caulking gun, hair-transplant surgeon James Harris, M.D., injects local anesthetic into the scalp of a male patient, a married financial analyst in his early forties who has asked not to be identified. We’ll call him Scott. For five hours, I’ve been watching Dr. Harris perform a hair transplant called surgically advanced follicular extraction, or SAFE. A follicular unit is a miniature, self-contained hair factory embedded in the skin. Each square centimeter of human scalp contains 80 to 120 follicular units, and each of those has one to four hairs.


Though Scott is sitting upright, his scalp is a gruesome battlefield. Rivulets of blood seep from thousands of BB-size puncture wounds. A trash can is brimming with blood-soaked gauze. But Scott feels nothing. He’s watching CNBC’s financial roundup on a wall-mounted TV while thumbing through e-mails on his BlackBerry, oblivious to the mayhem topside.

Dr. Harris is using a motorized tool he designed himself, in a procedure that, for all its bloodshed, represents the current state-of-the-art in baldness treatment. The instrument has a blunt hollow tube that lets Dr. Harris make incisions less than a millimeter wide, in rapid-fire succession, around clusters of hairs without damaging the underlying follicles. It’s painstaking work. I watched earlier as Dr. Harris donned mantislike headgear (dual loupes with six-fold magnification) and extracted follicular units from a band of hair between Scott’s ears, a region of scalp hair docs call the “horseshoe fringe.” In virtually all men, this fringe is impervious to balding, a vestigial result of genes that dictate how skin forms during fetal development.

By the time he’s through, Dr. Harris will have made 1,045 incisions along the front and top of Scott’s head, enough to accommodate the same number of follicular units removed from his fringe. An assistant counts the extracted follicular units under a microscope, tabulating the number of individual units and the number of hairs protruding from each one. Single-hair units are reserved for the front to create a feathered widow’s peak. “I want to avoid a wall of hair jutting from the forehead,” explains Dr. Harris, citing a common blunder of botched transplants. “SAFE is a lot less traumatic than other transplant procedures, such as a surgery in which a strip of scalp is extracted, because it’s minimally invasive.” Even so, the procedure looks medieval, and it’s hard to believe this gory mélange will have a happy ending.

There is also an interesting point here:

Hair transplants have improved dramatically in the past 10 years, although in the hands of unskilled surgeons, mishaps can occur that leave patients with gruesome doll heads. But transplants remain hamstrung for a more fundamental reason: You can shuffle only so many hairs from fringe to forelock. This is Scott’s fourth surgery, and at this point he’s simply running out of hair. It’s a dwindling game of musical chairs that confounds surgeons and frustrates patients. The average age for undergoing a hair transplant is 40, but hair is doomed long before that. To be precise, its fate is decided in utero, during the tenth week of pregnancy, when the human fetus is the size of a peanut shell. That’s when the fingers and toes take shape and the brain starts to evolve. It’s also when the hair follicles form—roughly 5 million over the entire body. This number is fixed: After exiting the womb, the human body can’t produce a single additional follicle.

That’s why a revolutionary technique known as hair cloning, or hair multiplication, holds so much promise. It changes the game because it gives transplant surgeons an endless supply of follicular units to restore the vanishing manes of their patients. Researchers in a handful of labs around the world have been testing the technique on mice with impressive results. Several start-ups have formed, and these companies are racing to complete successful human clinical trials. It could have a profound effect on the landscape: Male pattern baldness, or androgenetic alopecia, affects 40 million men in America. Although it doesn’t have any known physical downsides, the specter of premature aging and the perception of waning virility and diminished sexual attractiveness can be mentally debilitating and lead to personal, social, and work-related problems, according to Nigel Hunt, Ph.D., an associate professor of applied psychology at the University of Nottingham, in England. In 66 percent of men, hair follicles start to shrink around age 35 (in some men, it starts at age 21), causing hair to thin. By age 50, hair follicles are dying and 85 percent of men have significantly thinning hair. For these men, the cure for balding can’t come soon enough.

The Dawn Of Hair Cloning

The eureka moment for Colin Jahoda, M.D., Ph.D., and Amanda Reynolds, Ph.D.—a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Durham, in England—involved an experiment that also served as a nerdy version of a “Colin Forever” tattoo. Dr. Jahoda removed a hair follicle from his head, put it under a microscope, and snipped off a cluster of dermal papilla cells, which are located in a bulb at the root of the shaft. He then nicked his wife’s forearm with a scalpel and transplanted the cells. A few days later, a thick tuft of dark hair (complete with Dr. Jahoda’s male DNA) emerged. The experiment demonstrated, for the first time, the possibility of growing hair from transplanted dermal papilla cells. It seemed the two had found a new treatment for hair loss. Yet they soon discovered that, once removed from the body, dermal papilla cells quickly lose their ability to make hair if they are not transplanted immediately.

Angela Christiano, Ph.D., a professor of dermatology and genetics and development at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, collaborates closely with Dr. Jahoda on hair-related research. “Not long after you remove them, the cells don’t even know they’re dermal papillae anymore,” says Christiano, who is sitting in her office behind a desk piled two feet high with books and papers. “It’s like taking an Etch-a-Sketch and shaking it,” she says. “You erase their identity.”

The Jahoda-Reynolds experiment worked because a clump of hair follicle cells were promptly relocated, which preserved their inductivity, a measure of their capacity to remain uniquely hair cells before devolving into something more generic. While I’m in her office, Christiano calls England and puts Dr. Jahoda on speakerphone. “These cells seem to have an in-built regulatory system,” he explains. “We don’t know how it works. Getting the cells to remain inductive is still the basic challenge.”

Christiano became interested in hair follicle research in 1996, when a common hair disorder called alopecia areata caused patches of her own hair to fall out abruptly (steroid injections have revived it to a formidable whorl of ebony locks). Two years later, she made headlines after announcing she’d pinpointed several specific genes that are responsible for other genetic forms of hair loss—a scientific first. She is now focused almost exclusively on finding new genes for hair loss, as well as using dermal papilla cells to develop new ways of treating it. Scientists are still unclear about precisely what occurs, but they do know that whenever you pluck or shave a hair, molecular compounds in the follicle begin a complex dialogue with surrounding cells. These include dermal papillae, epithelial cells (those lining the wall of the hair shaft), and stem cells in a little-understood region referred to as “the bulge.”

The dermal papillae are encoded with genetic instructions that respond to cues sent from surrounding cells and tissues in the follicle. Once signaled, the dermal papillae begin hatching hair fibers. What Christiano and Dr. Jahoda are trying to figure out is how to trick the cells into growing hair by themselves, without guidance from the rest of the follicle. Doing this would allow scientists to culture, or clone, thousands of dermal papilla cells in the lab that would retain their knack for producing hair. “With current transplant surgery, if you take a thousand follicles from the back of the head and move them to the front, you still only have a thousand,” says Christiano. “With the cloning approach, you could start with a small biopsy of cells and then grow enough of them to repopulate your entire scalp with hair.”

A researcher named Claire Higgins informs us she has just received a fresh dime-size chunk of live scalp donated by a male hair-transplant patient. We join her in a lab, where she is hunched over a steel table, staring into a microscope. With forceps and a long needle, she scrapes dermal papillae from each follicle. I look through the eyepiece. She tells me I’m viewing roughly 3,000 dermal papillae packed into a ball of cells just a fraction of a millimeter wide. They resemble golden tobiko, the flying-fish roe dolloped onto sushi rolls. These cells will end up in an incubator, where they’ll be cultured for at least four weeks and then transplanted into mice to see if they’ll produce hair.

Several factors determine whether this happens. One is the growth medium, the soupy broth fed to the cells to help them thrive. Another is how quickly the cells multiply: As Dr. Jahoda and Reynolds showed, the less time cells spend outside the body, the better they retain their inductivity. A third factor is how the cells are transplanted. Do you inject them? Or position them surgically under the skin? “We’re trying to get into the heads of the dermal papillae and understand why they lose their inductivity,” says Christiano. “Then we’ll do the reverse: Take old cells that have been in culture for many months and bring them back into the fold, coaxing them to grow hair.”

I ask Christiano how she and Dr. Jahoda intend to accomplish this. She smiles, clearly not wanting to tip her hand, and replies, “We have a few ideas. I will say that if we figure it out, a lot of hair-loss sufferers will be very, very happy.” Their research could also inform next-generation baldness cures, genetic fixes that reprogram the cells, much like a software patch, and override the genes responsible for androgenetic alopecia.

According to Beher, the main challenge now lies in hair cloning technologies:

Nude mice are the foot soldiers for the war on balding. These dainty pink-hued rodents have been bred or genetically altered to remain hairless throughout their lives. They can be ordered by the mischief-load from medical suppliers and endure poking and prodding and other unspeakable horrors for the sake of balding men everywhere. In Philadelphia, Ken Washenik, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president of scientific and medical development for Aderans Research Institute and a clinical assistant professor of dermatology at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, shows me slides of nude mice on his laptop. They have undergone a new type of hair-cloning procedure that Dr. Washenik has been developing for Aderans. The company, which has its headquarters in Tokyo, is the world’s largest manufacturer of wigs. It also owns Bosley, which operates 88 hair-transplant clinics in North America.

When I arrive at Aderans, Dr. Washenik hastily ushers me past several labs, perhaps wary I might glimpse some sort of trade secret, and into an empty conference room. What he does reveal is that his approach to hair cloning (he calls it follicular neogenesis) doesn’t rely solely on dermal papillae. “We are using a two-cell construct, growing not just dermal papillae but also another type of cell from the follicle,” he explains. As the thinking goes, disparate cell types already communicate with one another in the follicle to regenerate hair. Dr. Washenik believes that if he can recreate that environment in the lab, cultured cells won’t get dementia and forget how to make hair. “The different cells in the follicle are smarter than we are,” says Dr. Washenik. “They already know they are supposed to be hairy. In eight days, we grew a ball of hair that never existed before on the back of a mouse.”

Dr. Washenik clicks an image file on his computer: The photo shows what looks like Piglet—but with a sable Mohawk. But there is a caveat: “These were hair cells from a mouse that were injected into a mouse. When researchers injected human cells into a mouse, they didn’t get the same results.” This disappointed Dr. Washenik and other researchers, because unlike other organs, follicles are supposed to be immune privileged: When transplanted across or between species, they’re expected to grow normally, without being rejected or provoking infection. He hopes to have better luck in clinical trials, when he will transplant human cells into humans. Aderans is in the second phase of a human trial, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The company is pouring serious cash (Dr. Washenik won’t say how much) into its hair-cloning effort. Dr. Washenik is also intrigued by other researchers who are pursuing another pathway. They’re cultivating in-vitro microscopic hairs, or “proto-hairs,” as Dr. Washenik dubs them. “These are early follicular structures that you can place in the scalp with the same technology that’s used for a hair transplant,” he says. “The big hurdle so far is getting the cells to multiply to make enough hair. Once we culture them, they sometimes die or de-differentiate.”

But Dr. Washenik remains confident. “The sooner we figure this out, the better,” he says. “So many people are waiting for this technology. I know that with every medical advance, the first one to market becomes the leader, and everyone else plays catch-up.” Like many of the scientists I meet, his passion for a cure is personal. “I started going bald at 25,” he says, tussling his hair to flaunt his 2,200-graft transplant. “While I was working on my Ph.D., I was mixing up homemade minoxidil [the active ingredient in Rogaine] in my lab.”

A few blocks away is a start-up called Follica. One of its cofounders, George Cotsarelis, M.D., is a cutaneous biologist and associate professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990, Dr. Cotsarelis was investigating the biological mechanisms of skin regeneration. “I was studying stem cells and found a population of them in the hair follicle, in a strange area called ‘the bulge,’” he tells me when I stop by his office at U. Penn’s School of Medicine. “We didn’t know the function of the area, and we almost blew it off.” From then on, Dr. Cotsarelis started paying more attention to hair follicles. After a series of more recent experiments on mice, he made two important discoveries. First, he found that bulge cells aid in the formation of new hair follicles, suggesting that these cells influence hair growth during embryonic development, when we were bobbing around in the womb. He also learned that, throughout our lives, these same stem cells awaken to mend minor cuts and burns, as well as deeper wounds in the skin. What baffled Dr. Cotsarelis is why, if a healing wound is populated with bulge stem cells, new follicles don’t form. The answer would at least explain why hair doesn’t grow from scars.

Dr. Cotsarelis conducted further studies designed to reveal what kinds of molecular compounds (e.g., hormones and proteins) are present during hair-follicle development in mice embryos and are also present in adult mice. A major one, which he wrote about in a 2007 Nature article, was something called Wnt (pronounced wint), a network of proteins first identified in fruit flies. Curious, Dr. Cotsarelis applied Wnt to small lesions purposely cut into nude mice (such gracious, noble critters). To his shock, follicles formed and sprouted hair. So if a person is bald, the obvious strategy would seem to be to douse his scalp with Wnt and wait for hair to grow. “The problem is that Wnt is involved in a lot of other things, one of which is skin cancer,” says Dr. Cotsarelis. “It’s very tricky business.”

The idea behind Follica is to develop a procedure in which a surgeon would lightly wound the scalp—something akin to microdermabrasion, an antiaging treatment—to disrupt the skin and then apply a compound that would influence hair development in the area. This would trick the cells into reverting to an embryonic state, one in which they are genetically pre-programmed to make hair rather than simply repair skin, as they’re predisposed to do after we’re born. “Just when cells are deciding, ‘Do I make a hair follicle? Or do I make an epidermis?’ we can influence them with a protein to go down a hair-follicle pathway.”

Testing the Science On Humans

My hair started thinning when I was 32. I’m now 40, and my shedding has eased up. Dr. Harris informs me I have plenty left for a follicular unit transplant. But after watching Scott’s procedure, I’m a little freaked out. Yet, all the specialists I speak with urge anyone dealing with hair loss to act fast, because once the hairs are gone, they’re gone for good.

“Absolutely no one concerned about hair loss should wait,” says Dr. Washenik. He started taking Propecia when he was in his thirties (he’s now 50), and he uses Rogaine religiously. He is a big advocate of drug therapies, and readily champions surgical options such as follicular unit grafting. Dr. Washenik examines my scalp and announces, “Rogaine is made for you. You’re not bald; your hairs are just miniaturized.” I’m a chemical-phobe, so I’d rather save my dough and wait for a viable hair-cloning procedure, which many of the experts I talked to claim is less than five years away.

Intercytex, a public company based in London, may be closest to a marketable product, says Jerry Cooley, M.D., a transplant surgeon who has been consulting for the firm since 2001. Nobody directly employed by Intercytex would speak to me for this story. “We do not feel that exposure of our research is helpful,” wrote Jeff Teumer, Intercytex’s director of research, in a curt e-mail. But Dr. Cooley, who works closely with Teumer, tells me that Intercytex scientists have successfully grown large batches of cloned proto-hairs similar to those that other researchers have been struggling to keep alive. What’s more, in animal experiments, the Intercytex team has observed cloned hair follicles growing hair again after the original hairs were plucked. This suggests that their cloned follicles cycle through the entire life span of hair—three phases known as anagen (growth), catagen (transitional), and telogen (resting)—something no other researchers have been able to do.

A key to the team’s success has been growing proto-hairs in a special medium, licensed from a Japanese inventor, which contains cultured skin cells known as keratinocytes. “I’m very excited about this technology,” says Dr. Cooley. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

Bessam Farjo, M.D., a hair-restoration surgeon contracted by Intercytex to run its ongoing clinical trials, says, “All I can tell you is that we’ve grown a significant number of hairs on animals through this technique.” It sounds encouraging, and Dr. Farjo expects to complete clinical trials this year.

Hair cloning will be pricey initially, so early adopters may be men who are not only wealthy but also desperate because they don’t have enough hair left to do a follicular unit transplant. Cloning could also be ideal for younger men who aren’t good candidates for follicular grafting. “Younger guys aren’t suitable for current surgical techniques because we don’t know how much hair they are going to lose,” says Dr. Farjo. Imagine if the receded hairline of a 25-year-old male were replaced with a follicular unit transplant. If the rest of his hair were to fall out—and going bald at an early age generally means it will—he wouldn’t have enough hair to complete a second or third follicular unit transplant, so he’d end up with a solitary plume sprouting from his forehead. “It would look like unfinished business, which is why we typically avoid working on young guys,” says Dr. Farjo. “But if I know I’ll never run out of hair, thanks to the new cell therapy, I can treat anyone.”

Nobody is sure how the actual cloning process will be implemented. Most surgeons speculate that they’ll use boring tools similar to the existing ones used for harvesting follicular units. The follicular units will be sent to centralized labs, where industrial incubators will mass-produce millions of follicle cells for a relatively low cost. Another question is how will the cloned cells be transplanted? Instead of transplanting follicular units, your surgeon may inject cloned cells into micro-incisions, or he may implant lab-grown hair follicles. It could be fast, clean, and painless. Or it might entail something closer to Dr. Cotsarelis’s method at Follica. At Intercytex, technicians are tinkering with sundry techniques. “We’re experimenting with varying the number of cells in each injection, and whether we have to inject the cells into the skin as it is, or if we have to pre-stimulate the skin,” says Dr. Farjo.

Whatever the outcome, choices will abound. In the future, hair cloning will coexist alongside follicular unit transplants, drug therapies, and emerging technologies still incubating in the labs. For his part, Dr. Harris is also part of a team designing the world’s first follicular extraction robot: It will fully automate the procedure, making it magnitudes faster and less expensive. While Scott, our balding financial analyst, was being prepped for surgery, Dr. Harris took me into his office to show me a photo of the $25 million speed surgeon (the actual machine was locked in a storage closet a few floors above us). At about six feet tall with a fixed base and a mechanical arm with multiple joints, it resembles one of those space-age automatons you might see on a vehicle assembly line at a Toyota plant. Dr. Harris has already tested it on a couple of willing volunteers (with no alarming mishaps) and is preparing to apply for FDA approval under the name Restoration Robotics.

“We think the robot might be able to extract a thousand grafts an hour,” says Dr. Harris. “That’s more than triple what can be done by hand. This will broaden the market so that more people can afford the procedure. There may be a time soon when hair-transplant surgery will be available to everyone.”

Natural Hair Regrowth - Herbs Becoming Effective Solutions For Baldness

Most people forget about herbs when it comes to stimulating hair growth. They often times too many run to buy and spend countless dollars on useless shampoo, pills, and every sort of gimmick in between. Hey, we all have made a mistake or two in regrowing hair.

Making Hair Grow Back - Easy Natural Steps That Work

You can easily and quickly start regrowing your hair and you won't have to worry about purchasing one single product in the process. Think it's too good to be true? Well guess again. You can easily find a natural solution to fix any balding hair problem and get your hair back thicker and fuller like never before.

Natural Hair Loss Solution - Using Natural Herbs to Combat Hair Loss

Hair loss is a common problem and it is visible in both males and females. This leads to billion dollar business for the industry and there are lots of available commercial products and treatments in the market. Find out more about using natural herbs as the effective hair loss treatment.

Home Remedies For Hair Growth

Waiting for your hair to grow longer can seem like an eternity. It can affect the appearance, confidence, and maybe even the self esteem of a person.

Vitamin E For Hair Growth

Promoting hair growth is somewhat similar to promoting the overall health of the human body. There must be adequate nutrients and vitamins to prevent hair loss, and for the hair to grow properly.

Hair Loss Treatment - The Biotin Effect

Biotin is an important component not only to new hair growth but also keeps the skin and nails in perfect health. Because Biotin and hair loss are inter related, deficiency of vitamin H may cause unhealthy and breakage of hair, which might finally lead to thinning hair.

How to Make Hair Grow Faster

When it comes to hair care, one of the most asked questions is how to make hair grow faster. People want to know how to grow their hair from very short to long quickly.

Banish the Comb Over - Hair Style Ideas For Bald Men

Most men are not fastidious about their grooming habits beyond taking a shower and smelling nice except for one particular thing - if they are losing their hair. Balding men are self-conscious about their follically-challenged scalps and go to great pains, like the infamous comb-over, to camouflage their creeping hairlines. The good news is there are some great hair style ideas for bald men that are quite attractive and can be great confidence boosters.

How to Prevent Seborrheic Dermatitis Hair Loss

Hair loss is one of the problems that affect both the body and the mind. Hair loss indicates that all is not well with the body. Hair loss normally occurs due to some nutritional deficiency, due to a scalp problem or as a side effect of some disease.

Effective Hair Growing Method Used by the Elite Few

You can try all sorts of different things in an attempt to stop your hair from falling out or even regrow what you've lost. But very few come close to anything like what you'll gain from the use of a few natural agents. What do I mean by natural agents you may wonder?

New Video About Hair Cloning or Hair Tissue Engineering for Hair Loss

German Biotech Company Sells Kit to Clone Hair Regrowth Cells

The German biotech company PromoCell is now marketing a Human Dermal Papilla Cell culture system to grow new hair cells in the lab — a necessary first step to make the dream of hair cloning a reality. The system combine nomal human follicle dermal papilla cells with PromoCell´s Follicle Dermal Papilla Cell Growth Medium and subculture reagents.

As the company explains it:

The dermal papilla at the base of hair follicles contains hair papilla cells which are differentiated mesenchymal cells. The function of these cells is of great importance for the hair formation and growth cycle. Dermal papilla cells are formed by a group of mesenchymal cells which controls the hair follicle formation in the skin of the embryo. Proliferation and differentiation in the hair follicle are regulated by the extremely important complicated interactions between specialised epithelial and mesechymal cells together with extracellular components.

Translation: Scientists and hair growth specialists can harvest papilla cells from a patient, culture them in a lab, and grow vast quantities.

For more information, visit PromoCell’s website.

Natural Tip For Fighting Thin Hair Faster

Fighting thin hair can be one of the hardest things to battle. There are literally a ton of things on the market that all claim to be able to make your hair grow back fuller and thicker. Hair loss is a billion dollar industry and it continues to grow as there are helpless folks looking for that one cure for this nagging problem.

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