A team at the Technion is developing an innovative new topical treatment that could treat baldness without the serious side effects associated with current oral medications.
Cure for male baldness with no sexual side effects?
The drug finasteride seemed like the answer to every man’s dream of keeping a full head of hair, but it caused nightmares for a small percentage of those who took it, in the form of erectile dysfunction and a greater risk for prostate and male breast cancer.
So when Alexey Tomsov saw that his father was developing a bald spot, he proposed to his partners on the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team that they invent an effective remedy applied directly to the scalp to avoid systemic side effects.
The Haifa team’s cure-in-a-comb ended up winning an iGEM 2015 Jamboree gold medal and first-place prize for Best New Application out of a field of 259 teams of undergraduate and graduate science students from across the world.
Now they’re working to refine and eventually commercialize the product, Tomsov tells ISRAEL21c. “We have a prototype comb already printed, and we validated our enzyme in the lab,” he says.
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