Researchers from MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School have developed a potential new treatment for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder causing hair loss. The treatment involves a microneedle patch that can be painlessly applied to the scalp, releasing drugs that rebalance the immune response at the site and halt the autoimmune attack. In studies on mice, the treatment allowed hair to regrow and significantly reduced inflammation at the treatment site without causing systemic immune effects elsewhere in the body. The microneedle patches are made from biocompatible materials and can be loaded with a combination of immune molecules that recruit regulatory T cells to reduce inflammation. The researchers plan to further develop this approach for treating alopecia and expand it to other autoimmune skin diseases such as vitiligo, atopic dermatitis, and psoriasis.
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New Treatment May Reverse Hair Loss Caused by Autoimmune Skin Disease
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