Growing Rat Hair ‘Like It’s No Tomorrow’
Christiano is taking a different approach — or, actually, two different approaches.
Her startup Vixen Pharmaceuticals worked to develop a hair loss drug from so-called JAK inhibitors, which tamp down the activity of a class of enzyI was reading an article about hair loss and new treatments on the horizon.
By Meghana Keshavanmes called janus kinase. Two JAK inhibitors have been approved by the FDA — not for baldness, but for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis ,and a type of skin cancer called myelofibrosis. Both are used off-label for other autoimmune conditions — including hair loss.
and one of the treatments mentioned was PRP injections to the scalp.
Vixen was acquired a few months ago by Pennsylvania-based Aclaris Therapeutics; the company intends to develop JAK inhibitors to treat hair loss. (Regarding that name: “Vixen,” of course, is the term for female fox — and, as Christiano noted, the word “alopecia” means “mangy fox” in Greek.)
With her second startup, Rapunzel, Christiano aims to solve a big problem in hair transplant surgery: It requires removing hair from one part of the body to transplant it elsewhere. But there’s only a finite amount of hair to harvest from one’s own body.
That’s why she wants to grow hair in the lab.
The challenge, to date, has been getting scalp stem cells to turn into actual hair follicles — for years, scientists could only get them to morph into standard fibroblasts, which are cells that create generic connective tissue. Christiano’s lab has now found that it can grow actual hair on a 3D scaffold of tissue culture medium doused with a mix of growth factors.
Hair restoration surgeon Dr. Joseph Greco thinks Cristiano is headed in the right direction.
“The race to the moon is the multiplication of hair,” Greco said. “To be able to have an inexhaustible supply… That’s coming in the next five to ten years.”
On top of standard hair transplantation surgery, Greco offers a technique called “platelet rich plasma,” or PRP, which is meant to stimulate growth in lazy hair follicles. Seven out of 10 of his hair loss customers are women.
Greco’s team draws a patient’s blood, spins it in a centrifuge to extract the plasma, isolates growth factors from the platelets, adds nutrients, then re injects the mixture into patients’ scalps. It costs about $1,600 for the first treatment, then a bit less for follow-on visits — recommended every six months to a year.
Don't you think 1600 $ for drawing patient's blood spinning it in a centrifuge and reinjecting it in to the scalp is too much ?
Greco participated in a 2014 pilot study of 64 women that found PRP showed promise in treating androgenetic hair loss but the procedure has not been formally tested in a randomized clinical trial.
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