Hair Loss Cure 2020

It has been a while since I wrote a post on brief news items and thoughts related to hair loss.

The Worst Year in Hair Loss

Alyssa Milano Covid-19 Hair Loss. Source: Instagram.

The stories about Covid and hair loss never stop. It first got major attention in 2020 due to actress Alyssa Milano’s experience.

I am skeptical about whether it is: the actual Coronavirus causing the hair loss (usually lasting several months); Or whether it is major emotional and psychological stress (i.e., telogen effluvium) causing the hair loss. It also seems like far more women then men are reporting worsening hair loss since the pandemic began. At least on social media.

In any event, several days ago “The Atlantic” magazine published a hair loss article with a great title: “The Year America’s Hair Fell Out“. The author deems the pandemic as “a near-perfect mass hair-loss event“. At this point, the one year is in reality 1.7 years of masking , lockdowns and vaccination. That is unless you live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where life continues as normal despite only a five percent vaccination rate.

The author also points out the numerous ineffective hair products and outlandish hair growth claims all over the internet. Natural products and hair loss supplements are especially a dime a dozen. NPR now also covering the story yet again.

Will a Paralysis Cure Arrive Before a Hair Loss Cure?

Scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago have successfully created a gel that reversed paralysis in mice. This was the biggest news in the medical world this week. The actual study is titled: “Bioactive scaffolds with enhanced supramolecular motion promote recovery from spinal cord injury”.

Watch this video on YouTube

The gel enabled paralyzed mice to walk four weeks after initial injection. The mice given a placebo never regained the ability to walk. 76 mice were split between the treatment and placebo groups. Apparently, there are 1.5 million people in the US who are living with paralysis.

The gel sends biological signals that trigger nerve cell and blood vessel regeneration. It also restores essential fat insulation (myelin) around nerve cells and removes scar tissue that could hinder cell regeneration. Best of all, this gel is inexpensive to produce. In the future, it could also be tested on patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Extracellular Vesicle Mimetics (EMs) and Hair Growth

I am always on the lookout for new studies on exosomes and hair growth. Note that exosomes are also known as extracellular vesicles (EVs). Large-scale production of EVs remains difficult. Recently, extracellular vesicle mimetics (EMs) engineered by extrusion through various membranes have emerged as an alternative approach for large-scale production of EVs.

A new study from South Korea made an interesting finding. The research scientists developed something called macrophage-engineered extracellular vesicle mimetics (MAC-EMs). The MAC-EMs when injected induced hair regrowth in mice as well as hair shaft elongation in a human hair follicle. Encouraging signs that suggest the potential of MAC-EMs as an alternative to EVs when it comes to use for hair growth.

Hormonal Treatments

I just saw this almost 1,000 page thread on HLT a few years late. I only went through 5 pages so far, but it is great. I have frequently cited the crazy hair regrowth that balding MTF transgender persons experience after they start “kitchen skin” hormonal treatments. In many instances, they get back long-lost hair in areas that have been bald for many years.

I am always surprised that non-transgender people almost never seem to attempt this all-out approach. A male obviously never wants to become feminized. However, there are enough desperate males who have major hair loss related depression. I would have thought that many would give in and go for this “side effect guaranteed” and “hair growth guaranteed” approach.

Lo and behold, the above HLT thread that I discovered late was started by someone “Bridgeburn” who is NOT transgender. He just wanted to regain his hair and throw the kitchen sink of hormonal treatments into the mix. He has seen amazing hair regrowth in the process. I really like his signature:

“Youth is more valuable than gender.”

Among the hair loss products that he takes or took regularly include:

Estradiol (aka Estrogen).
Cyproterone Acetate (an anti-androgen).
Dutasteride (the strongest available DHT inhibitor).
Minoxidil.

Today’s “The Telegraph” newspaper from the UK has an interesting article titled:

“Are we witnessing a new dawn for baldness treatments?”

Unfortunately, the article is behind a Paywall, but I have highlighted the main points further below.

Interesting New Baldness Treatments

As is the case with all such clickbait titled articles, a lot of the information is not new to us or is exaggerated. Nevertheless, I do believe that the past 5-10 year period has been the most groundbreaking in hair loss research history. And this article has some interested new information.

Dr. Coen Gho

Amazingly, the first ten paragraphs of the article are devoted to Dr. Coen Gho and his Hair Science Institute! For anyone who has been reading about hair loss treatments for more than 15 years, Dr. Gho is a legend as well as highly controversial. Please read my past post on Dr. Coen Gho and his hair multiplication technique.

Dr. Gho’s method attempts to avoid donor area hair thinning by only using part of the follicle during a hair transplantation procedure. It supposedly works by stimulating the stem cells within that small piece of tissue to generate new hairs. At the moment, this supposedly yields two hairs from a single follicle fragment. However, Dr. Gho is now developing a separate technique that could potentially generate 10 hairs:

“Gho has just gained approval to test the technique in female patients in research studies. If all goes well, he hopes that it may be possible to offer it as a treatment in the next four to five years.
Right now a typical treatment involves taking grafts from 1,400 hair follicles, which means 3,000 new hairs,” says Gho. “Can you imagine what we can achieve if we could use those same grafts to generate 10,000 hairs?”

Please note that there is significant debate and controversy about Dr. Gho’s technique and its efficacy.

According to Dr. Gho, current hair transplant demand at his clinic is 3-4 times higher than before the Covid pandemic. This makes sense per various hair transplant statistics. All my hair transplant advertisers also backed out this year since their clinics are too busy through Spring 2022. They do not want to keep rejecting new patients! Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Instagram and more have really pushed people into getting cosmetic surgery at a record rate.

Cassiopea and Riken

In this article, Cassiopea CEO Dr. Diana Harbort is quoted as saying that there is a major need for a novel hair loss treatments. She gets weekly e-mails from people trying to enroll in trials for the company’s hair loss product Breezula.

Riken and Dr. Tsuji are discussed in great detail, especially his attempts at crowdfunding (they only need $3.2 million). According to Dr. Tsuji:

“As soon as we can get the funding, a clinical study could be started within a few months, and a pay-to-participate clinical program could begin within two years in Japan.”

Dr. Ke Cheng and Exosomes for Baldness

Of most immediate interest to me is a section on exosomes as being one of the new array of baldness treatments. It is preceded by a discussion of PRP for hair loss.

I have covered exosomes in detail in three past posts. There was also a presentation on this treatment at last month’s ISHRS conference (where it was discussed favorably, albeit with warnings about new FDA regulations).

In this latest Telegraph article, the author interviewed Dr. Ke Cheng from the Cheng Lab at North Carolina State University. Mr. Cheng is a professor of regenerative medicine and his research interests include exosomes and micro-RNAs. His team published a paper on exosomes and hair growth in 2020:

Cheng Lab Exosomes — Exosomes hair loss treatment paper from Cheng Lab.

Dr. Cheng’s Lab is using exosomes from healthy hair follicle cells (which also contain microRNA) and injecting them into balding regions of the scalp. These “fresh” exosomes send messages to the hibernating cells to promote hair regrowth.

“So far Cheng has tested this approach in mice and found that it can achieve a six to seven-fold increase in hair growth compared with traditional hair loss drugs such as minoxidil. He is now conducting experiments to see whether the same results can be achieved in human hair cells in the lab.”

Dr. Cheng plans to start clinical trials in “the next five years” and is actively speaking to venture capital firms. Kind of a strange time frame, since so many hair transplant surgeons already offer this treatment.

Even with strict new FDA regulations, it seems like some doctors are still treating patients with exosomes. Note that these extracellular vesicles are derived from another person, so are not classified as autologous in nature.

Mass Hair Loss Event and Paralysis Cure