THE OBSERVER: How close is a cure for baldness?

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The Holy Grail remains a drug that will promote regrowth, but this might not be so far away. Earlier this year, Manchester University announced that an osteoporosis drug had been found to have “dramatic results” promoting hair growth when applied to tissue samples in pre-clinical trials. The resultant frenzy left the PhD student responsible, Dr Nathan Hawkshaw, a little dazed. “Every other week, something comes out about hair loss and it doesn’t generate as much media coverage as what I experienced,” he grumbles. He’s in this for the science – there aren’t many fields where you get to mess around with real human tissue – but such is the distress caused by hair loss and such is the potential customer base that interest is always high.

“It all started with a particular drug, Cyclosporine A, which is an immunosuppressant,” Hawkshaw explains. “It’s typically given to transplant patients to stop them rejecting new organs post-surgery and it’s been observed that it enhances hair growth. But the thing is, you don’t really want to give this to patients normally because you don’t want to suppress their immune system. So, I used that drug to treat human hair follicles in the lab to try and identify how it actually worked.”