Scientists believe they've discovered a cure for baldness. It's hiding in your hairy moles — and can be injected like Botox.

Some moles are, dare I say it, almost a little too good at growing hair. But according to new research, there is one molecule that drives pesky moles on our skin to overproduce hair. And the researchers who discovered its hair-growing potential believe it could be used to treat age-related hair loss. "You don't need to actually invent any new molecules," hair scientist Maksim Plikus from the University of California, Irvine told Insider. "Nature has them all." By Hilary Brueck  on Jun 21, 2023, 11:50 AM EDT https://www.insider.com/hair-loss-cure-scalp-regeneration-via-botox-like-treatment-2023-6 In a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Plikus and his colleagues revealed osteopontin — a molecule "that has not been previously linked to hair growth" — is very active in hairy mole skin.

Plikus believes this compound could be needled into the scalp of balding men and women to reawaken hair follicles that have gone dormant, in a near-painless Botox-like procedure. "The hair people are getting really excited," he said. But first, this new anti-balding technique — which has already been tried out in mice — must prove successful in clinical trials of people, set to start this summer.

Why osteopontin from our moles could be a great hair-grower  Plikus said he knows lots of people are kind of "annoyed" by their hairy moles. Maybe they "pluck it out" or "shave it off." Not him. He said he's always been fascinated by the way some of our moles put hair stem cells "into overdrive," creating lengthy strands in spots where hair would otherwise grow short. Plikus suspects that by injecting osteopontin around old follicles that have stopped producing hair, dormant stem cells could be reactivated, regrowing bald spots that develop on our heads with age. "There's these essential signaling molecules that a teenager's hairs would be producing in large quantities," he said. The molecules are produced en masse by senescent cells, which are sometimes called "zombie cells" for their negative, inflammatory effects on aging bodies. But for hair, Plikus thinks these senescent cells are fulfilling an important, and very youthful function: encouraging hair to grow in abundance, like the grass on a well-watered lawn. Osteopontin isn't all that's required for skin pigment to darken and turn into a mole, so he's not worried about the scalp of treated patients becoming one large, bulbous mole field. He said any "features of the hair" on a person's head — like its natural color or texture — should be preserved, because those "properties are encoded within the follicle." "It will grow like you remember it when you were 18, it would not grow like thickened, wiry armpit hair," he said. "This burst of molecules is shown to hair follicles on a scalp, and they're like, 'Oh, OK. Time to grow!'"

How to get your hair back: it's "complicated" For decades, scientists have been hunting for a Holy Grail treatment for hair loss like this, with very limited success. To date, there are only two popular, widely used hair loss treatments that actually work. The brand names for these medicines are Rogaine and Propecia. Both drugs were discovered by accident, neither works perfectly, and they're not right for everyone. "Hair's complicated," Plikus said. Amplifica, a California-based biotech company that Plikus helped co-found, will trial their mole-inspired hair loss treatment in the coming weeks. The company wouldn't share details with Insider, but the treatment will likely involve a combination of osteopontin and some other, newly-discovered hair-growing proteins Plikus has found. The therapy would be applied like Botox, through microneedling of hair follicles in the scalp.