Researchers stumble upon 'astounding' baldness blocker

Medical researchers have made an accidental discovery that could be considered a big, hairy deal.

While probing the link between a hormone known to be produced in reaction to stress and its effect on gastrointestinal functioning, a team led by scientists from UCLA and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have discovered that a peptide, a small protein molecule, known to block the actions of the stress hormone may help prevent or reverse balding.

In fact, the protein factor, known as astressin-B, spurred "astounding" hair growth in lab mice that were genetically engineered to overproduce the stress-related hormone, according to Million Mulugeta, and doctor of veterinary medicine and an adjunct professor of medicine in the division of digestive diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Mulugeta, co-director of the preclinical stress biology program at U.C.L.A., was a corresponding author of a report on the role of astressin-B in reversing hair loss that was published in the online journal PLoS One .

"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," Mulugeta said.

The research team had been using the mice that had been genetically altered to overproduce the hormone corticotrophin-releasing factor, or CRF, while assessing the impact astressin-B has on CRF levels in the rodents' intestines. This study was being funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Mary Stenzel-Poore of the Oregon Health and Sciences University, who developed the mice that overproduce CRF, was part of the research team that produced the PLoS One -published study. Jean Rivier and Catherine Rivier of the Salk Institute, who were also part of the team, developed astressin-B.

Mulugeta and his colleagues at UCLA and the VA inject astressin-B into the genetically altered mice that had extensive hair loss on their backs because they had too much CRF but did not see an immediate drop in the level of the hormone in the mice's intestines. So they decided to continue the injections for another five days and see what happens.

When they later went to check how things were going they had a slight problem: The formerly balding mice had regrown hair and were indistinguishable from the unaltered mice that were used in the experiments as controls and hadn't lost any hair.

"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," Mulugeta said. "Subsequent studies confirmed this unequivocally."

The researchers aren't yet ready to say astressin-B can spur hair growth in balding humans. They think it could, however, because balding mice treated with the anti-baldness medication minoxidil showed the same moderate hair growth seen in human minoxidil users.