Hair apparent?

There’s a story in Stuff about a potential new cure for baldness

A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

The first thing to notice about the story is the name of the new drug, WAY-316606. That’s not a drug name. That’s a drug-company internal name of a research compound. This isn’t a story about repurposing an already-approved drug. The name of the cancer drug “CsA” they supposedly started with also looks a bit weird.

The next thing to note is that we aren’t given much source information, apart from the Daily Telegraph. The story there has the headline Baldness cure could come from side-effect of cancer drug. You’d need to sign up there to actually read it; I wouldn’t bother if I were you.  Searching for keywords like “baldness” and “Manchester” finds the press release.

The press release tells us some interesting new facts. First, “CsA” isn’t a cancer drug at all. It’s cyclosporine A, the immune-suppressant drug that made organ transplants really feasible in the 1980s.  It looks as thought the Telegraph invented the connection with cancer — maybe by misunderstanding the fact cyclosporine increases cancer risk. Second, the research paper is in the journal PLoS Biology — unlike the Daily Telegraph story, it’s open-access.   The press release is also more measured about the medical potential, saying “Clearly though, a clinical trial is required next to tell us whether this drug or similar compounds are both effective and safe in hair loss patients.” As far as I can tell, WAY-316606 hasn’t ever been tested even for safety in humans.

The research paper is harder going. It does have this graph (Figure 3A) comparing hair growth in hair follicles treated with WAY-316606 and untreated controls. It’s true that the treated hair grew faster, and it’s true it was 2mm after 6 days, but the difference from untreated hair was a lot smaller than that.

The research paper links to another paper about WAY-316606, which is not open-access.  That paper gives a hint as to why WAY-316606 isn’t a drug already: it doesn’t last long enough in the body (at least, the bodies of rats). It might work better applied to the scalp. Or not.

So, this is interesting biochemical research that might turn out to have practical applications for hair growth, but it’s not really a way to use an existing drug to cure baldness.