Reversing a receding hairline may be possible
In experiments on mice, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania show that the skin of wounded animals can naturally regenerate hair follicles.
They also identified a gene that is essential for normal hair development, and were able to stimulate or stop hair growth by boosting or inhibiting the protein’s activity at a molecular level, opening the way to non-invasive therapies.
The results have stunned many scientists, who have long assumed that mammalian hair follicles were a non-renewable resource.
The human head comes equipped with approximately 100,000 of these tiny, hair-generating organs, and once they stop working, it was thought the scalp was doomed to gradual exposure.
The study, published in the journal Nature, is all the more surprising because it reproduces results observed 50 years ago in rabbits, mice and humans that were widely dismissed at the time and have been ignored since.
