Hair Loss News

Doctors in Korea recently published a study on an experimental hair transplant procedure where they harvested hair grafts from one person and transplanted them into another.

The two female participants were sisters who had been involved in a previous bone marrow transplant.  One of the sisters had leukemia and at the age of 14 had been donor matched with her sister who had donated bone marrow to her.

The leukemia had gone into remission, but at age 21 the bone marrow recipient had lost a lot of her hair due to chemotherapy drugs.  Since the sisters were already tissue-matched for compatibility, the doctors wanted to see if they could transplant hair follicles from the one sister to the other.

The doctors first created a small clinical trial with 20 hair follicles and monitored the results by evaluating the growth at 6 months and again at 18 months.  

Twenty hair grafts were removed from the back of the donor’s scalp and were transplanted into the patient’s nape of the neck.  In the exact reverse of this, 20 hair grafts were removed from the back of the patient’s scalp and transplanted to the nape of her sister’s neck, the donor.

No immunosuppressive drugs were used - Immunosuppressive drugs are usually needed in organ transplants to prevent the immune system from attacking the foreign cells that have been transplanted into the donor.  

The results were very encouraging.  After 6 months the doctors found that 12 of the 20 hair grafts that had been transplanted to the patient’s nape had survived and were still growing.  After 18th months however, only 7 grafts remained.

In her sister the results were a lot different.  After 6 months only 2 hair grafts out of the 20 that were transplanted from the leukemia patient to the healthy sister had survived.

The doctors suspected that a small difference in the compatibility of the antigens (immune system triggers) might play an important role in rejecting person-to-person transplanted hair follicles and the different tolerances of the respective girl’s immune systems caused the significant differences in the survival rate of their transplanted hair follicles.

Statically speaking, the donor’s hair grafts that were transplanted to the patient showed a survival rate of 60% at 6 months and 35% at 18 months. On the other hand, the patient’s hair grafts that were transplanted to her donor sister’s neck showed a survival rate of only 10% at 6 months and 0% at 18 month.

Following the success of the small test procedure, 2,200 hair grafts were then harvested from the donor’s sister and were transplanted to the patient’s scalp. Most of the transplanted hair grafts survived, and the patient acquired a significant clinical improvement at 18 months after the hair transplantation surgery.

We believe this is only the second time it has ever been done.  The first reported case was done by doctors at Ferrara University, Ferrara, Italy in 1999.