Huge market awaits hair growth breakthrough

By JEREMY LAURANCE

We grow babies in test tubes, so why not hair?

It ought to be simple. A sheet of cells raised in the laboratory which, when stitched on to a polished scalp, produces a good thick rug that could rescue men from baldness.

And for the company that cracks the problem, the riches would be untold.

Odd then, that it has so far defied the best efforts of the hair technologists.

In the US, it is estimated that 35 million balding Americans spend US$1.5 billion a year on hair-restoration products, drugs and transplant surgery.

Men have grappled with hair loss since the dawn of time. Hippocrates noted that castration saved the eunuchs in the Persian Army from baldness - but stopped short of recommending it as a treatment.

The belief that a hairless scalp is a sign of manliness has persisted - in business baldies do well, and the fashion for aggressively shaved heads, like David Beckham's, looks like an attempt by men to reassert their dwindling authority.

But women don't like a slaphead - at least one with a worn-out, threadbare look (as opposed to the deliberate close crop).

The yearning for a luxuriant head of hair is about preserving youth, and men are prepared to spend to achieve it.

Companies are now waking up to the potential and are investing to meet the challenge. Aderans, the world's largest manufacturer of wigs, is pouring funds into the science of follicular neogenesis.

Hair transplantation has been practised for 50 years. Early efforts involved lifting hair "plugs" from the back and sides of the head and replanting them on the top. Each plug contained 15 or 20 hairs, creating the much-derided bottle-brush effect. Today, surgeons can replant as few as two hairs at a time, creating a more natural look.

But no matter how skilful the surgeon, the success of transplantation is limited by the quantity of available hair. It is a supply-and-demand problem that Ken Washenik, head of research at Bosley's hair-regeneration lab, is determined to solve.

Instead of removing a chunk of scalp, the scientists in the Bosley lab are extracting single hair cells and attempting to get them to replicate in the laboratory. These "dermal papilla" cells mature into hair follicles in the process known as follicular neogenesis. If they can be stimulated to multiply, there should be no limit to the number that could be grown in the laboratory and then transplanted back to the head.

"It's the Holy Grail of hair technology and we are going to be the first to get it," says the ebullient Washenik, who invites visitors to his Beverly Hills office to inspect his own hair transplant, carried out to conceal a receding hairline, with hair grown in the traditional way.

Washenik has a mountain to climb. It is 14 years since the technique of stimulating hair cells to regenerate was first demonstrated by a British researcher, Colin Jahoda, at the University of Durham in 1990. He took follicle cells from his own head, cultured them in the laboratory and implanted them between the pale hairs on his wife's arm. Out grew a thick dark hair with male DNA. He carried out a similar experiment with mice and proved that hair cells could be induced to grow anywhere on the body.

Since then, researchers around the world have been trying to find ways to make the dermal papilla cells multiply. They will grow strongly when placed in a petri dish in the lab, but in doing so they lose the capacity to develop into hair follicles. The researchers ended up with a lot of generic cells that would not grow anything.

In America, Japan, Holland and Britain, researchers are looking for the magic ingredient that will trigger multiplication of the dermal papilla cells without loss of the genetic signature that tells them to grow hair. But some scientists wonder if they will ever find it.

Terence Kealey, a biochemist and vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, says it is every researcher's dream to extend the work begun by Jahoda but the prospect of success is diminishing as the years go by.

There are also safety concerns. "If you grow things in the laboratory you have got to add things to the medium - growth factors, which may be obtained from other people. Nothing is risk-free in science and there is always a concern that you might activate disease."

Kealey believes there is greater potential in developing drugs such as the hair tonic Minoxidil. He runs Cambridge Biotechnical, specialising in the development of products for the skin and hair. The company has been retained to investigate Minoxidil, marketed under the brand name Regaine, which was hailed as the first effective counter to baldness when it was launched, but turned out to help fewer people than hoped - only one in 100.

At Bosley International in the US, Washenik remains upbeat and hopes to start human trials of cultured hair cells within the next two years. His researchers have experimented with different combinations of growth catalysts and he claims that 80 per cent of his laboratory-grown cells now produce hair when implanted in mice.

Even if the trials are successful, Washenik admits it will be at least five years before the US Food and Drug Administration approves the process, opening the way for it to be marketed to the public. Nor would it come cheap, at an estimated cost of $10,000 a head.

- INDEPENDENT