Don’t Hold Your Breath for Hair Cloning
When I first began practicing in this field 28 years ago, the gurus in hair restoration surgery indicated “we would have the ability to clone hair follicles in ten years”. That would have been in 1996! Well, now I am a guru and I am hear to report to you, unfortunately, that we will not have the ability to clone hair for many, many years.
I am at the 22nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS) in Malaysia and just heard lectures to this point. It is not as if research is not being undertaken; it’s simply that it has not yielded any positive results to date. Research companies working on this process are closing versus flourishing.
Think about it. We all have seen the images of a human ear growing on the back of a mouse. The problem with the hair follicle is that it is a very complex structure, which performs a number of tasks.
It has several components from skin cells to a sebaceous gland, to a tiny muscle that contracts and pulls on the hair (when your “hair stands up on end when frightened”) to blood vessels, to all of the cells that actually construct the hair shaft itself. Additionally, it has to produce this hair that will then have to cycle for life! It is a huge system to be able to clone…
What I have been telling my patients every day in the office is to be as proactive as they are willing to be in using Propecia, Rogaine Foam, and the Auto A300™ laser cap in order to retain the hair that they have and to potentially regrow some back. If they want their own growing on their heads again (and are good candidates), then hair transplant surgery is what they should consider.
Sorry for the disappointing news about hair cloning, but don’t allow male or female pattern baldness get the best of you, contact Leonard Hair Transplant Associates to begin treating it!
