— In August, I covered groundbreaking new research related to successful hair regeneration in mice. The work was led by scientists from USC (in particular, Dr. Mingxing Lei and Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong). For some reason, a new CNBC article on this now relatively old news appeared in October and became the most widely covered hair related story this month. Three different people posted the exact same CNBC link in the comments to the last post, and one person even responded with two different takes to the exact same link and story. To be fair, even people on Reddit Futurology (where a week old story is old news) seemed to think that this was a new development.
— Thanks to commentator “Karl” for posting a link to a new study from China regarding electrodynamic microneedling in the comments to my Indian microneedling post from August. Yet again, microneedling seems to lead to significantly increased hair growth when used in conjunction with Minoxidil versus when using just Minoxidil by itself. However, even more interesting, microneedling by itself led to more hair growth than Minoxidil by itself in this study (EDIT: per several commentators who read the full study, this is not accurate and at best you can only say that both resulted in equal new hair growth). Totally crazy that something like wounding works better than one of the only two ever FDA approved hair loss treatments out there. Of course more such results need to be emulated before this becomes believable.
Follica has for a long time claimed that skin disruption in and of itself leads to new de novo hair follicle growth. In the India microneedling post, “Karl” made an interesting lengthy comment related to the above study, and it is worth a read in its entirety. I will paste part of it related to needling depth here:
“Personal observation: that difference of 1.5mm to 2.5mm might seem small, but if you’ve ever done it, you know that it’s HUGE. 1.5mm hurts a lot already, and for some people is borderline unbearable. 2.5mm is getting into torture level lol. Pity they weren’t more specific about their procedure. The question of depth, wounding, and scarring seems an open question in research afaik and is discussed frequently on forums”.
— Samumed added a new page on its site regarding the status of each of its clinical trials. They just Tweeted that link.
— Seems like commentator “egghead” gave great advice regarding waiting to buy a newly public company after the initial turbulence is over. HAIR stock down drastically in the past 3 days.
— PolarityTE latest press release and new video.
— Replicel’s hair loss work covered in Forbes magazine.
— Fecal matter transplant regrows hair in two alopecia areata patients.
— Dr. David Saceda has been responding to questions by “Tim”. It looks like better ways of measuring DHT and other hormone levels during messotherapy with Dutasteride treatments might be necessary.