The key to increased hair growth lies, among other things, in your MikroRna, a group of molecules that control, among other things, the activity of your genes — so whether a gene produces too much, too little, or the right amount of proteins.
Old stem cells get new energy
In the study in mice, scientists found that they could mitigate the stem cells in the mice’s hair follicles by increasing the production of the molecule MiR-205.
The special thing is that the molecule stimulates the stem cells already present in the hair follicles and allows the hair to grow. So the molecule only activates old, tough stem cells that have grown with age.
In the lab, success was evident to see:
“After 10 days, the hair started growing back,” says Rui Ye, MD, a professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. In a press release.
Ye and the rest of the research team used transgenic mice and advanced microscopes to measure the viability of stem cells.
It remains to be seen if this method can be used for human scalps.
“We next want to test whether we can stimulate hair growth in mice by administering miR-205 directly into the skin with nanoparticles,” says Ye.
If this works, we will conduct experiments to test whether this microRNA can also promote hair growth in humans.
