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November 2005

Scientists Study How to Make a Bald Head Hairy Again



NEW YORK --

Look around a crowd, and you'll see that lots of middle-aged men are losing their hair. As Baby Boomers, they have every right to demand, "What is science doing about this?"

Quite a bit, it turns out.

A British company, for example, says five guys are walking around with hundreds more hairs than they had before, thanks to an early test of what's been called hair cloning. An American outfit hopes to start testing a similar approach next year.

Other scientists are tracking down genes that make some men susceptible to hair loss, and struggling to understand the mysterious biology behind it. For example, how can men lose hair on the top of their heads while their beards and even eyelashes keep going strong?

Black men are far less susceptible, but about a third of 30year-old white men have signs of what doctors call male-pattern baldness. By the time they're 50, about half of them do. The condition creeps across the head like three tiny armies bent on deforestation: one starting at the back, and two making inroads from the front.

Sure, some men say bald is beautiful. And others can smear on minoxidil (Rogaine) or take Propecia pills or get hair transplants.

In fact, right now is "the best time in history to be going bald, because there's an awful lot of things that can be done," says Dr. Ken Washenik of the Aderans Research Institute in Philadelphia, which is investigating the "hair cloning" approach.

But the drugs don't help everybody, and not everyone is interested in a transplant. So there's room for new approaches.

To understand the search for new treatments, it helps to know a little about hair and male-pattern baldness. (Women can also get hormone-induced baldness like this, but it's not clear if it's really the same condition).

Everybody starts out with a lifetime supply of about 100,000 follicles on the scalp, each primed to produce a single hair shaft. Normally, any given follicle pumps out that shaft for two years to six years, then takes a break for a few weeks. Then it sheds that hair, and starts the cycle over again.

Each day, we lose about 100 hairs this way. No big deal; about an equal number of follicles enter the growth phase on the same day, and at any one time about 90 percent to 95 percent of the follicles are busy growing new hair.

But in some men, in selected places on the scalp, this orderly process goes awry.

The hair-growing phase gets progressively shorter and the resting phase gets longer. So the resulting hairs get shorter and shorter with each trip through the cycle. Eventually, they don't even poke out through the scalp.

What's more, affected follicles take longer to start growing hair again after they've shed the last one. And they shrink, so the hair they produce is finer. On your head, it's like replacing mighty trees with saplings. And the total number of remaining hairs slips by about 5 percent a year.

What causes this? The full picture isn't known, but it clearly involves a combination of genetic susceptibility and hormones, including testosterone.

In England, meanwhile, a company called Intercytex has just begun human studies of an approach sometimes called hair cloning. It focuses on a particular kind of cell, found at the base of the follicle, that can team up with skin cells to produce new follicles.

The company has recently tested this on seven men with thinning hair due to male-pattern baldness, and five of them gained hair, says Intercytex chief scientific officer Paul Kemp. This was just an initial study to look for side effects like inflammation, Kemp says, and no such problems appeared.

"Sometime in the future, I think baldness will be a choice rather than something you have to suffer," said Kemp. "Any bald people will have chosen to be bald."