In the News – Unihair (Aderans) Hopes Hair Cloning Will Increase Sales

Snippet from the article:

Unihair of Japan, the world’s biggest wigmaker, is hoping for a big increase in sales through what might be regarded as the ultimate cutting-edge technology – a method to “grow” luxuriant displays of new hair on a person’s scalp.

The method uses cell-generation processes derived from pharmaceuticals research. “We see a tremendous number of possibilities [from the new process],” said Tadao Otsuki, Unihair’s chief executive. “It adds up to a fundamental shift in how the world can combat problems of baldness.”

With the help of the new techniques, based on ideas developed in the US and which are now undergoing clinical trials, Unihair is hoping to increase its annual sales roughly three-fold, from Y57.3bn ($706m) in the year to February 2010, to about Y150bn in 2017.

Read the full story from the Financial Times — Unihair gets a grip on baldness

There is a big difference between what we hope to achieve with using ACell in hair transplantation to multiply hairs in an ‘auto-cloning’ manner and what Unihair (formerly Aderans prior to September of this year) is trying to do with cloning hair outside of the head in a lab.

It’s in the best interest of patients that these technologies work, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.