Hair Loss Research

In last five decades, discovery of Follicular Unit Transplant-FUT has revolutionized the treatment of hair loss. Hair restoration surgeons are developing new instruments and techniques to improve the science and art of hair transplantation.

Scarcity of normal hair follicles is one of the limitations of hair transplantation. This can be a real problem in sever balding patients and also in patients who need multiple procedures due to progressive nature of their baldness. To solve these problems developing a new source for hair replacement procedure is inevitable. Using stem cells and culturing normal follicular cells is a new and interesting area that has been very attractive to many clinicians and investigators in the field of hair restoration. Developing a technique to proliferate normal hair follicles can help not only the patients with minimal hair reserve but also the other patients with thicker hair to grow hair naturally without having any problem with harvesting or complications with donor area.



Hair follicle cloning (is it really working?)
Animal studies have shown good results from cloning (culturing) hair follicular cells as a source for more donor follicles. This could be particularly interesting for treatment of alopecia in the patients with limited harvestable follicles. Hair follicle cloning has not been as successful in human as of yet, but there are several ongoing research projects on this topic at this time.
Future of hair loss and hair restoration surgery
The advances in molecular biology and gene therapy and effectiveness of some growth factors including KGF [Ref1, 2, 3] have brought the hope of using gene therapy as a method of treatment of alopecia. Transfection of cutaneus cells with growth factor DNA is a new approch for treatment of wound healing and its usefulness for alopecia is under investigation.