Cosmetic Surgery Blog

Marianne’s latest post on hair restoration ,where she expressed her hope for hair cloning, made me wonder if this something we can expect soon.

Is it possible to clone hair? Will this be available soon?

The short answers: “Apparently, yes,” and “It depends on your definition of soon.”

Bundles of money and time are being spent trying to find new ways to cure baldness and hair loss. Hair cloning—more accurately called hair multiplication—is being researched big time as a possible way to create more hair follicles (hair follicle cloning), either in the scalp or in the lab.

How hair follicle cloning works? A hair follicle is the tiny skin unit that grows the hair. As we develop before birth, chemical signals tell some skin cells to turn into hair follicles. We are born with as many follicles as we are ever going to have; that’s it, there ain’t going to be no more. Each follicle has a little bunch of cells at its base called the dermal papilla. Researchers have taken a hair follicle, harvested cells from the dermal papilla, and gotten those cells to grow and multiply in the lab. When these cells are then transplanted back into the scalp, they appear to be able to create new hair follicles and cause hair to grow.

Sounds like a cure for baldness, right? Not quite, or at least not yet. They still have trouble getting those hairs to grow in the right color and thickness. We have hair follicles all over our body, but most of these do not create the type of hair that we grow on our scalp. Take a look at the little hairs on your arm to see what I mean. Getting the follicles to grow the right type of hair in the right direction is another problem. All the hairs in a particular area of your head grow in the same direction and if they didn’t, your head would look a bit scruffy.

Intercytex, a European company that is working on this, has released some of the results from its early studies on small groups of men. Some men showed a good amount of hair growth and some had only a little. There was little information on the quality of the hair or how good it looked. Because the report was based on only a few weeks of follow-up, there is no information on whether the hair kept growing. Larger and longer studies are underway.

So, yes, hair multiplication, aka hair cloning, is coming, but don’t hold your breath waiting. It has announced as being right around the corner for the last five years and it has been taking longer than expected to work out the kinks in the procedure. A guesstimate is that hair multiplication may make it into general use by 2009 or 2010.

Even further down the road is the possibility of finding out what chemical signals cause some skin cells to turn into hair follicles. Then we could just apply those chemicals to the scalp, and voila, more hair follicles!