There’s new hope for treating hair loss — for women, too

She calls her startup Rapunzel, and for good reason: Angela Christiano is working on growing a full head of hair in the lab.

Christiano, a researcher at Columbia University, has a condition known as alopecia areata, which leads to sudden and substantial hair loss. And she’s not satisfied with the treatments on the market: There are just two approved drugs for hair loss, and both are more than 20 years old.

So she’s trying a radically new approach — turning a patient’s own stem cells, which in theory can convert into any type of cell in the body, into hair that could then be transplanted to cover bald patches.

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