The Era of 'Freezing' Hair Follicles... What Are the Effects? [Kim Jin-oh on Beating Hair Loss]

[Financial News]  What if, while you still have plenty of hair, you could set a little aside for future use? That would be especially welcome news if you have a family history of hair loss. If you could store your hair follicles now and use them later, the ways of preparing for hair loss could change, too.

'Hair banking'—harvesting and storing healthy hair follicles in advance, much like eggs or sperm are frozen and stored—grew out of this idea. The technology was also featured recently by the U.S. publication the New York Post. Hair follicle storage services are already available overseas. The idea is to obtain cells from follicles secured at a young age, multiply them sufficiently, and use them for hair restoration later in life.
The reason this proposal is intriguing lies less in the freezing technology itself than in what comes next. People who choose to store their tissue are unlikely to be satisfied simply knowing it is sitting in a freezer. They expect a treatment they can actually use if their hair thins someday. The value of hair banking depends on how much of that expectation can be fulfilled.
As a hair transplant surgeon, I have plenty of reason to be hopeful, too. Today, hair transplantation is surgery that moves existing hair follicles. Even if the area affected by hair loss grows, the number of follicles that can be taken from the back of the head is limited. If cells needed for treatment could be obtained from a small amount of tissue—or even used to create new follicles—the options available could expand.

That is why this technology needs to clearly explain what is being stored and what can be done with it later. Storing an entire hair follicle and isolating and storing specific cells from a follicle are different approaches. Helping existing, thinning hair grow and creating new follicles to increase the overall number of hairs are also different goals. Care is needed because grouping all these processes under the term 'hair regeneration' can make the technology sound more advanced than it really is. 
Research on cryopreservation has already been conducted. In one study, researchers froze human hair follicles, thawed them, cultured the cells, and confirmed that a particular type of stem cell retained its ability to differentiate. Obtaining usable cells from stored tissue is a clear achievement. However, the finding that certain cells survive does not mean that the structure and function of the entire follicle are preserved intact. 
Even if cells survive thawing well, another challenge remains. Dermal papilla cells play an important role in regulating hair formation and growth, but as their numbers increase during culture, their ability to induce hair formation may weaken. In other words, both the technology for obtaining large numbers of cells and the technology for making hair from those cells need to be developed.
In this area, researchers have succeeded in inducing hair follicle formation in experiments, and studies have also observed improvements in hair density or thickness after follicle-derived cells were injected into people. But success in experiments, improvements in limited clinical trials, and sustained treatment effects using tissue stored for a long time each need to be verified separately.
Businesses proposing to isolate and store cells from hair follicles in advance, then culture them later for use in hair-loss treatment, have also been introduced in South Korea. Related research is ongoing as well. Recently, South Korean researchers reported results from improving methods for isolating and culturing cells and observing hair growth in mice. Research has not come to a standstill. Still, these achievements should not be mistaken for treatment outcomes in people who have used a storage service.

The freezing and storage of eggs and sperm are linked to reproductive medicine techniques already used in clinical practice. Of course, those techniques do not guarantee pregnancy or childbirth either. The difference is that hair banking still has many aspects of the hair-regeneration treatment to be developed for use after storage. Similarity in storage methods should not create the impression that the treatments that follow are equally well developed.
More research is needed to determine which cells should be used and how, how many hairs of what thickness can be achieved, and how long the effects will last. For patients, another important question is whether using stored follicles later is actually better than harvesting new ones at that time. There is still a gap between the promise of securing young tissue and demonstrating a clinical benefit.
I hope to hear welcome news as this gap narrows. It could give people who are limited by the number of available hair follicles a new option. But those who store their follicles now are securing material that could potentially be used for future treatment. They are not reserving the timing or the outcome of that treatment.
After the era of freezing hair follicles, I hope an era will come when we can say how long taking those follicles out and using them restored people's hair. Then we will be able to give people considering storage much more specific answers than we can today.

/Director Kim Jin-oh of New Hair Hair Transplant Clinic 
[email protected] Kim Hyun-seon Reporter