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Environment

Peptide Induces Hair Regrowth In Mice

Astressin B helps genetically altered mice to regain skin pigmentation and regrow nearly all their hair

by Lauren K. Wolf
February 28, 2011 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 89, Issue 9

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Credit: PLoS One
Adult stressed mice three days after treatment with saline (control, top) and three days (center) and four weeks (bottom) after treatment with astressin B.
Credit: PLoS One
Adult stressed mice three days after treatment with saline (control, top) and three days (center) and four weeks (bottom) after treatment with astressin B.

For people who suffer from hair loss due to chronic stress, help might be on the way, according to a research team led by Million Mulugeta of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016377). The scientists recently stumbled upon a potential new treatment for alopecia while testing the effects of the 41-residue peptide astressin B on the gastrointestinal function of stressed mice. Engineered to overexpress stress-associated corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) neuropeptides, the model rodents exhibit baldness and exaggerated responses to stress. Just two weeks after a five-day course of daily injections of astressin B, a known CRF protein receptor antagonist, the mice regained pigmentation on their pink skin and regrew nearly all their hair. In addition, the team administered astressin B to young model mice that had not yet lost their hair. Those rodents exhibited negligible hair loss for two months after treatment. “These new findings may well be clinically relevant,” says Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Manchester, in En­gland. “It now deserves to be systematically studied how CRF and CRF receptor antagonists affect human scalp hair follicles.”

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