A researcher by the name of Dr. Million Mulugeta may have found a way to make a million or much more. It's very early yet but Dr. Mulugeta of UCLA reports that while conducting a study on stress he and his research team managed to find a cure for baldness – in mice. They released their findings in February of 2011.
Dr. Mulugeta says the compound they used on the mice was not intended to do anything at all for hair loss, or rather fur loss, but for stress. The mice had experienced their hair/fur loss while being genetically altered to produce extra stress hormones for the purposes of the research.
Mice Reverse Hair Loss After Treatment
They were then injected with a compound, a peptide, astressin-B to study its affect on stress. Researchers did not need to monitor the mice and when they returned three months later for testing they had trouble telling their mice from other lab mice.
"When we analyzed the identification number of the mice that had grown hair we found that, indeed, the astressin-B peptide was responsible for the remarkable hair growth in the bald mice," Dr. Mulugeta said in a UCLA press release. "Subsequent studies confirmed this unequivocally."
The doctor said that since releasing these findings – published online in the journal PLoS One – he has had many inquiries from media looking to learn of their findings. The hair replacement industry is a multi-billion dollar one and regrowth of hair could be considered a major find. They are a ways away from that, however, Dr. Mulugeta says.
Hair Loss and Hair Regrowth Study
Dr. Mulugeta, an adjunct professor of medicine in the division of digestive diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was conducting his work on mice in conjunction with the U.S. Veterans Administration and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They were looking at methods of helping reduce the stress combat veterans experience.
Dr. Mulugeta intends now to study hair regrowth and his UCLA research team, along with Salk Institute researchers, applied together for a patent to study the use of astressin-B peptide for hair regrowth.
"Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding long-term hair regrowth in chronically stressed mutant mice," said Dr. Mulugeta. "This could open new venues to treat hair loss in humans through the modulation of the stress hormone receptors, particularly hair loss related to chronic stress and aging."
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