I think cocona is right. If they understood pattern baldness enough to cure it, then we would have a cure, and there aren't many cures for diseases today. I could be wrong, but I think hair loss researchers could be taking a bit of a simplistic engineering approach to this vexingly difficult problem to solve. If hair loss could be reduced to a simpler analogy, say, a long electrical wire with a single LED light on the very end of it, and the light just isn't turning on. If hair loss is a bulb or LED not lighting up at the very end of a 200-foot wire wrapped around the house, then we go outside, with a flashlight, because it's 2 am and drank too much vino, and check the AC power outlet. It's plugged in but still no light. So we walk the first two feet of length and find a break in the wire. We splice it back together and wrap the connection in black tape. What do we do next? Should we walk the entire length looking for all possible breaks in the wire, and we know there are many things that are detrimental to hair growth. But no, the firs thing we do is plug the wire back into the AC outlet and test the whole wire again, because the single splice might possibly be the only break in the wire preventing the light from coming on. I think hair loss researchers are saying, Look, we know this is critical to hair growth, so let's first try blocking janus kinase, or PGD2 or whatever, and then test it to see if hair growth is switched on. If it works in vitro and in vivo with mice, then let's do clinical trials. There could be many cracks in the insulation of the wire and not an ideal situation for the physical wire, but let's gamble and see if making one splice in what could be the only thing stopping the LED from turning on, is all we need to do. It might be a waste of time finding every minor defect in the wire because the first one could be the only break that needs fixing. Similarly, it could be that there is one critical break in a cellular signaling pathway that turns on hair growth.
