Researchers Call Gene Therapy a Possible Baldness Cure : Medicine: Team reports successfully putting a gene into a mouse follicle. But key to hair growth remains elusive.

SAN DIEGO —  Working with bits of mouse skin growing in plastic dishes, researchers have used genetic engineering to inch closer to a goal that has eluded sorcerers, cosmetologists and scientists throughout history: a cure for baldness.

“We think this opens the field for gene therapy of the hair process,” said biochemist Robert M. Hoffman, head of AntiCancer Inc., a biotechnology firm here that is doing the work.

To be sure, no such gene-therapy product for restoring long-lost hair exists. And Hoffman and co-workers are cautious, acknowledging that the road to medical ignominy is paved with fleeting discoveries hyped as the greatest thing since the plastic comb.

But a report of their study, which appears today in the journal Nature Medicine, encourages optimism about a problem that has bothered mankind and even womankind about as long as there have been mirrors.

“This is very exciting,” said Dr. Michael A. Huie, a molecular biologist and a dermatology resident at UC San Francisco. “It immediately suggests some novel approaches to treating male pattern baldness.”

Typically, a person every day sheds dozens of scalp hairs that return if hair-growing cells are healthy and active. The shiny pate characteristic of male pattern baldness, which has long been known to be genetically inherited, happens when those cells become dormant.

For years, legitimate hair researchers and back-room pharmacologists alike have sought the precise reason that some scalps are genetically programmed to slip into metabolic winter. Theoretically, once researchers solve that puzzle, they might be able to reawaken hair growth by replacing a defective gene, for instance, or supplying a missing one.

In the new study, Hoffman and Dr. Lingna Li, also of AntiCancer Inc., showed for the first time that a human gene can be selectively delivered to cells in the root of a living hair follicle. The transplanted gene had nothing to do with hair growth but instead served as a sort of molecular crash dummy, allowing the researchers to test whether their gene-delivery system worked.

The vehicle for the dummy gene was a tiny, frothy vesicle of lipid, or fat, known as a liposome. The “fat bubbles,” as Hoffman called them, were applied to bits of mouse skin the size of match heads that rested atop postage-stamp-sized pink sponges in a plastic dish. When follicle cells in the skin were later probed for the dummy gene, it was not only present, but was much more abundant there than in other skin cells.

“Often in gene therapy, the obstacle is getting the gene where you want it to go,” Huie said. “This opens the door.”

A next step, Li said, is to find out if a liposome can shuttle a dummy gene into human hair cells. She added that her lab has devised a technique for sustaining bits of human scalp--harvested during plastic surgery--in a dish for up to 10 days.

For now, the Holy Grail of hair research remains the gene or genes that control hair growth. Once researchers pinpoint the key gene, the thinking goes, it might someday be inserted into dormant hair cells in a liposome-based cream. Alas, no scientist predicted when that day will be.

AntiCancer Inc., one of about two dozen firms located in a part of San Diego known as Biotech Beach, is a private company that was started primarily to test drugs against cancer.

In fact, it was an interest in testing drug toxicity on hair cells--hair loss is a common and dreaded side effect of chemotherapy--that led the researchers into the baldness spotlight, which usually calls to mind cheesy infomercials for shaggy cover-ups rather than sober papers in a prestigious scientific journal.

Dr. Peter M. Goldman, a Los Angeles dermatologist who has conducted research on hair replacement therapy, is deeply skeptical of the new finding.

“I think it’s a lot of basic science poppycock that won’t have any applicability to patients for years, if ever,” Goldman said. “Experiments involving animals rarely translate to humans, especially with a complex organ like hair. It may be exciting to scientists, but I wouldn’t be too excited about it.”

Anthony Saintangelo, president of the American Hair Loss Council, a trade group in Chicago, said wig makers and hair weavers fear no competition from gene splicers. “I don’t see anyone getting nervous,” he said.

Recalling the hubbub several years ago over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Rogaine as a hair-stimulating drug, Saintangelo said, “People were going crazy to get their hands on it, but now we know it’s not a miracle drug.”

Saintangelo said he tried Rogaine, to no avail, and now sports a “hair addition.” If genetic hair therapy ever became available, he said he would give it a shot, adding, “How else are you going to learn?”