I know what you all mean by the wait - it seems like they fob us off every 5 years with a lick and a promise to deliver something in ... 5 years. Waiting for biotech to produce something is not like waiting for the next app or the next iPhone. Biotech is slow and expensive due to the need for R&D and clinical trials. Mice speed up the basic research as their hair cycles are much faster than ours, and their normal life spans are what, two years? They know if a drug or procedure is questionable if the lab mice don't live to two years. Monkeys closer in biology to us, but the waiting for results and overall expense would be too much.
But treatments, and not cures but treatments as Cotsarelis said, are coming. They do seem more credible now than 10 or 15 years ago.
Expectations for a baldness treatment today are very realistic, unlike 10 or 15 years ago. In just another few years, a company called
Unity could have trials completed and NDA submitted for a drug that is currently increasing median life span of mice by up to 35%. The drug works by getting rid of senescent cells associated with serious age-related diseases, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and heart disease. Imagine having two and half more decades of good health added to your life with this new approach to cleansing the body of senescent cells and, by the
looks of these mice, growing more hair, too. New treatments for hair loss are not far fetched if we consider these new classes of drugs hoped to extend human life span(as opposed to life expectancy) for the first time in millennia. Considering the ambitious goals of anti-aging scientists and the progress already made in the basic science end of things, growing hair should prove very doable by comparison.
