A mole with hair growing out of it may be the key to solving baldness, according to Dr. Maksim “Max” Plikus, a professor of Developmental and Cell Biology at the University of California, Irvine.
“What happens inside the mole is hair goes from small and fairly invisible to very large thick hair,” Plikus told the Business Journal.
“We thought that since nature did an important experiment for us already—it created millions of people with hairy moles—why don’t we reverse engineer that?
“This is the kind of transformation that we desire when we want to cure baldness.”
Plikus’ team of researchers found a new molecular mechanism for stimulating hair growth that may offer a road map for the next generation of therapies for androgenetic alopecia, a common form of hair loss in women and men.
Their research was published June 21 in Nature, which Plikus called “the Mount Everest of journals.”
80M Affected
Plikus has long been studying hair loss, for which there is little effective treatment for an ailment that affects 50 million men and 30 million women in the U.S.
Hair transplantation has a conundrum in that there usually are not enough healthy hair follicles to be planted in the bald areas.
A head typically has 500,000 hair follicles, each of which could be compared to a 3D printer that respectively reprints a strand of hair, Plikus said. When baldness occurs, it’s because a follicle doesn’t have an activator telling it to print hair.
“In the field of hair growth, there’s an arms race to identify molecules to induce hair to grow,” Plikus said.
“We managed to reverse engineer this mole biology. If one can deliver the key molecule, it will imitate the effect of the mole cells on bald hair.”
Plikus’ team found that hair inside skin moles, called nevi, accumulates large quantities of senescent pigment cells that contain a specific signaling molecule called osteopontin.
While this molecule was known to biologists, Plikus’ study showed that for the first time that the osteopontin molecule causes normally dormant and diminutive hair follicles to activate their stem cells for robust growth of long and thick hairs.
“Senescent cells are typically viewed as detrimental to regeneration and are thought to drive the aging process as they accumulate in tissues throughout the body, but our research clearly shows that cellular senescence has a positive side to it,” Plikus said.
Last year, the Business Journal reported that Plikus’ team found a signaling molecule called Scube3 that potently stimulates hair growth. Scube3 belongs to a different family of signaling proteins compared to osteopontin, and their molecular mechanisms of action are non-overlapping, he said.
“For this reason, both are very interesting as candidates for hair growth medicines,” Plikus added.
Trials to deliver osteopontin molecules using “microneedles” in a pain-free method to the scalp are scheduled for this summer at San Diego-based Amplifica Holdings Group Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Plikus and which raised $11.8 million Series A funding last October.
“Within a span of 22 minutes, the entire skull can be microneedled. The patient walks out with barely any redness,” he said.
