Hi all! I’ve stumbled across a study about a chemical called PGD2. It’s found in high concentrations in hair follicles which have experienced androgenic alopecia. It helps cause follicular miniturization and turn a terminal hair back to a vellus hair. In the study, they applied the PGD2 to the dorsal side of mice and over time, the hair started falling out and chanign from terminal to vellus or even fully going away. The researchers also tested it on human cells and it had the same effect. What I was wondering is if it could be used as a permanent hair removal option in humans. Id really like to test this but the chemical runs about USD 180 per mg and needs special handling to preserve it. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Here’s the study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3319975/
The chemical itself has serious handling requirements, may have chronic impacts on fertility or foetuses, and I can’t immediately find any research that has used PGD2 on live human subjects. Most of the research to date appears to be uncovering how to inhibit naturally occurring PGD2 to treat male pattern baldness. There’s also no indication that its effects are permanent. In other words, if it did work for the purpose of follicular miniaturisation, this may require lifelong treatment.
There’s a lot of money to be made from our physical insecurities, including permanent hair removal. If the pharmaceutical industry thought they could ethically research this and develop a marketable PGD2 drug to do this, it would already be well underway, but I can’t find anything.