Scientists Are Working on a Gene-Hacking Drug That Could Treat Baldness

A team of researchers have come up with a new treatment for balding, using gene modification techniques.

The team is associated with the University of California, Irvine and a company called Amplifica.

Experiments with mice were detailed in a new paper. The hair growth signaling pathway was turned on permanently in the mice.

The result: the mice rapidly grew hair, in a promising first step towards a potentially revolutionary treatment for an incredibly common condition.

The team found that the mice that had their genes modified were expressing a molecule that appears to hack into hair regrowth.

The technique worked in mice that had human hair on their skin.

It will take a long time before the treatment can be used on people. Maksim Plikus, UCLA professor and Amplifica chief scientific officer, has no problem imagining a future in which ScUBE3 is a simple,otulinumtoxinA injection for balding patients.

"You have a patient sitting in a chair that looks like a dentist's chair, they close their eyes, and then you go tch, tch, tch," he said.

It would take less than 20 minutes to inject the molecule into the skin.

One major flaw of the system is that if patients don't have hair, what will happen? If that happens, they'll be stuck with the option of having new hair.

Despite that limitation, scientists are investigating new ways of addressing an issue faced by the majority of the male population and a large chunk of the female population.

The Follicle-Hacking Drug could be used to treat Baldness one day.

Doctors say a cheap pill may reverse hair loss.