Once your hair is already gone, regrowth treatments can only do so much — and in rare cases, they can have some serious side effects.
But what if you could have a savings account… for your strands? Enter hair banking, the experimental treatment that could help fight future baldness by collecting and cloning the hair you have now.
While medications and transplants are the current remedies for the millions experiencing hair loss in the US, hair banking puts hair loss on ice — literally.
The process is similar to egg or sperm banking, with single hair follicles, typically between 100 and 120, collected from a patient and stored via cryopreservation to freeze time on the stem cells in the hair.
Cells from the dermal papilla, or the base of the follicle, are then multiplied in a process known as hair cloning — and, if successful, they are ready to be injected back into the scalp whenever the patient wants them.
So it’s your own hair… collecting interest.
“The idea behind hair banking is to preserve the hairs that have the most longevity,” Dr. Carlos Wesley, a hair restoration surgeon, told The Post. “It’s preserving the potential that we have in the early stages of our lives to be used later on when it can be of more value.”
When the cloned hair is added back to the patient’s scalp, it fuses with the existing stem cell of the hair follicle that’s thinning out, and “reprograms [the follicle] to stay in the growth stage for longer,” Wesley added.
While hair transplants often require surgery and downtime, collecting the hairs to be banked is a much shorter and less invasive process.
In a process that takes around 20 minutes, a small area of hair is shaved and numbed with lidocaine, according to Dr. Matthew Lopresti.
“Once that’s numbed up, hair units would be removed … down to the hair follicle itself,” saod Lopresti, Chief Hair Restoration Surgeon at Leonard Hair Transplant Associates.
The process used to extract hairs is known as Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE,) in which a strip of scalp tissue is removed before being divided into grafts.
“It’s then put in a solution, which starts the cryopreservation process,” Lopresti said. “Once it gets to the laboratory, they test the cells for viability to make sure that the cloning would be successful.”
Hair banking is not yet cleared by the FDA. While harvesting and storing the hair doesn’t require approval, the cloning is still experimental.
The science of using preserved follicles in future cell-based hair restoration treatments is also still being developed — so future treatment or results aren’t guaranteed.
While several clinicians across the US can take care of the harvesting and banking process, the research facilities where the harvested follicles are sent to be cloned are outside the US, with 19 centers worldwide and Wesley and other doctors working with facilities in Guatemala and the UK.
There’s also a chance the cloned hairs may not take to the scalp.
“We had hoped … that those 100 hairs would be made into 10,000 hairs, place them on the scalp and they would grow,” Wesley said. “But that hasn’t been realized yet. We’ve all been a little bit humbled to see that the hair doesn’t take consistently.”
While banking hair has been generally successful — Lopresti says patients see increased density and “potentially increased hair per square centimeter” — it may not be for everyone.
“Based on very early findings, this is a really good treatment for early-stage hair loss,” Wesley said, noting that those with a family history could use hair banking to slow down the process of hair thinning. “Those seem to be the best responders rather than someone who is completely bald.”
Lopresti agrees that those who are experiencing early hair thinning and miniaturization are ideal patients so that “reintroducing new cells would turn [miniaturized] hairs back on to their full maturity.”
Not all areas of the head benefit from cloned hair injections, though.
“This approach is not the best for the hairline,” Wesley said. “So far… this is best for the scalp and the top of the head.”
Many of the patients that have undergone the procedure have been men in their 20s or early 30s.
Women are also considered good candidates, given that hair restoration surgery is not as effective because of the unique nature of female hair loss.
While the procedure isn’t readily available, Lopresti estimates the cost would be competitive with that of a hair transplant, which ranges from $5,000 up to $20,000 in the US.
Wesley agrees with the lower end of the price tag, adding that there are additional fees to bank the hair year after year.
However, Lopresti notes that current research around hair banking is limited, and it’s unclear whether the treatment and studies will expand to more people.
“We’re hoping that maybe if the research continues to advance, that even patients that have extreme thinning to balding may actually be a candidate as well in the future,” he said.
