Gene Therapy as the Future of Hair Restoration




The most common type of hair loss, pattern baldness, is a hereditary problem. With almost 100% guarantee a person can say if a parent experienced some kind of hair loss, the child will have it too. Various treatments can help in slowing it down, but they cannot completely eliminate the problem. This is where various future technologies come in handy. One of them is gene therapy.

Gene therapy is a process of changing genes of existing cells in the body provoking them to function differently. This technology is in the very beginning of its development, but there are already a few examples of its successful work.

First of all in the course of the studies gene therapy specialists have to figure out how the inherited medical condition (hair loss) appears at a DNA molecule level and then try to extract it from there or change the information it carries. The problem of the male pattern baldness is dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, the derivative of testosterone that aims to kill hair follicles. Some of hair cells are very sensitive to the DHT while the others resist its attacks strongly. If gene therapy specialists will be able to find the right genes, they can turn all DHT-sensitive cells into DHT-resistant ones.

This process is not as easy as it might seem. First of all it is important to find the right genes. There are thousands of them in any DNA and although there has been a lot of progress in mapping genes in the recent years, the scientists are still very far from knowing all of them. This situation concerns all the genes, especially those responsible for hair growth cycle and for inherited hair loss. However, in the course of some studies scientists found out that there are several genes responsible for making proteins that cause hair follicles to be sensitive to DHT.

There has been an interesting discovery which was published in the journal Science in January, 1998. A group of scientists has discovered a gene which was responsible for rare type of inherited baldness called atrichia. It affects babies as soon as they are born: infant hair falls out and never grows back. A few days after birth these babies turn to be absolutely bald. This hair loss is caused by the gene found in chromosome 8p21. The leader of the study, Angela Christiano, PhD, says it is the first step towards identifying inherited hair loss.

After the necessary genes are identified, there will be other studies in order to find how to modify the genes and make them DHT-resistant. In the October 1999 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation a group of scientists led by Ronald Crystal, MD, has published a research in which resting hair follicles in mice were modified and started growing healthy hair after they were exposed to bigger than normal quantities of protein made by the Sonic Hedgehog Gene or Shh. There have not been any similar successful studies on people.

The final important stage for gene therapy to discover is how to deliver new modified genes to the hair cells and make the cells use them instead of turning to the old genes. The problem here is that the mature cells being modified do not carry the information to the new cells and as soon as they wear out, the new cells that replace them have the original DNA with old genes. The biggest success was achieved when the scientists used crippled viruses to insert into the desired genes and then they carry the information even to the new cells. The viruses change the DNA that it cannot reproduce or have harmful effects and allow putting new information into the genes.

All these researches need more development, but their results show that gene therapy is a possible way to avoid inherited hair loss and make hair follicles produce hair strands for lifetime.

Jack Miller

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Posted on January 21, 2010 
Filed Under Hair Loss, Hair Loss News and Statistics, Hair Loss Treatments

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