Could it be that the cure for hair loss might come from research into the cure for hearing loss… we investigate.
The Central Challenge to Finding A Hair Loss Cure
The commercial imperative to produce new drugs for the market means the search for a hair loss cure remains unattractive to the large pharmaceutical companies who could afford it, for the simple reason that it would never become a prescription medicine. As an elective solution, one that each individual chooses whether or not to pay for, it could only ever be an over the counter product. As such it would need to be both competitively priced and affordable… which is not the case for medicines they produce for the prescription market – these are paid for, in the main, by insurance, or in the case of the UK by the national health service.
Has The Cure Already Been Found?
News reaches us this week that a team of researchers at the Massachusets Institute of Technology, MIT to it’s friends and admirers (of which there are many), have produced a treatment which they hope will cure hearing loss. The market is huge, one in six people will experience loss of hearing as they get older.. as well as straightforward decrepitude it can be bought on by a number of triggers which have become extremely common among an ageing population. The only solution available today is the cochlear implant, which bypasses that part of the ear which is not working and induces the auditory nerve creating signals the brain interprets as sound.
In a normally functioning ear, hairs play a critical role. A total of around 15 and 20 thousand hairs are in the ear, split into two types – inner and outer. Around 20% of the hairs are of the inner type, situated in the cochlea, the inner part of the ear. The problem is that when we lose these hairs they are not replaced and over time our hearing suffers.
MIT
Fortunately for hair loss sufferers, and the hard of hearing, the team at MIT have produced a mixture of drugs that have proved potent in enabling people to regrow these hairs. With a stellar reputation for academic research, MIT has dozens of affiliated Nobel laureates and has been rated the world’s No. 1 university, there is every reason to be optimistic. The key here is that they have identified a massively profitable opportunity for their concoction in hearing loss… most definitely a treatment that would be available through insurance and hence capable of carrying a big price ticket.
We are told that the plan is to move to full human trials in around 18 months from now, so nobody should confuse this with anything that is going to happen soon. Assuming the treatment proves successful in it’s original guise it is surely a small jump from there to gaining relatively easy approval for a similar treatment targeting hair loss. We live in hope.
HIS Hair Clinic
Given the need to progress to and through those human trials, and from there to the development and trial of the hair loss solution is likely to take the best part of a decade. In the meantime, if you are suffering with hair loss then you should be booking a free consultation with one of our friendly team of experts. To get the ball rolling simply complete the contact form at the side of this page or click here to find your nearest clinic.
