Alopecia: from clinic to preclinic and back

On average, 60–70% of men and 25–40% of women suffer from various forms of hair loss on our planet. If we turn to WHO statistics, we can see that about 75% of Russians are more or less susceptible to baldness. The hair follicle is an appendage of the skin, a kind of mini-organ that cyclically changes throughout a person’s life. Periods of regeneration and rapid growth (anagen) alternate with periods of involution (catagen) and dormancy (telogen). As a rule, hair begins to fall out when the correlation between the number of hair follicles in different phases of development is violated. The occurrence of alopecia is associated with the influence of heterogeneous etiological factors, which further determine the pathogenesis of the disease and the clinical picture. The treatment of alopecia requires the use of a personalized approach to each patient. Both medicinal and cosmetic compositions are available for therapy in different dosage forms. At the same time, there remains a need for the search for new active pharmaceutical substances and the development of drugs based on them. However, in order to develop effective therapies, we need to reconstruct in detail the pathogenesis of alopecia on animal models. Then the extrapolation of the result human-animal-human will be accurate and problem-free, and the search for new means — successful.