ABSTRACT
The hair growth promotion product market is rapidly growing and a very com-
petitive area in the personal care market. The efficacy of these products dictates
their success in the marketplace. Therefore, research on hair growth promotion
products is possibly one of the most basic science-based, R&D-mediated areas
among personal care product development. However, even with tremendous
efforts being made for decades, a very small number of marginally effective com-
pounds have been developed. At present, only two products are categorized as
FDA-approved active compounds, one of which was found accidentally from
its side effect during a clinical trial for another purpose. This demonstrates
how complicated and difficult it is to develop hair growth promoting compounds
solely based on strategy and common science knowledge/techniques without any breakthroughs and innovative tools. In this context, biotechnology would provide
hair biology researchers the potential technology to develop novel effective pro-
ducts. Within the biotechnology field, rapid progress in molecular biology in the
last two decades has given birth to recombinant DNA technologies, or so-called
genetic engineering. Recent completion of the worldwide genome project also
seems to provide additional potential information for genetic manipulation. In
the personal care field, hair growth promotion research may benefit the most
from these innovative technologies. Until now, because no active compound for
hair promotion has been made by genetic engineering (i.e., biofermentation),
this chapter will mainly discuss utilizing this technology to investigate basic
biological mechanism of hair growth and establish novel evaluating systems
for hair growth modulation. In the future, once an active compound is found, a
biofermentation process may be used to produce it. In this chapter, we describe
basic terms of hair biology and the potential application of recombinant DNA
technology to hair research, especially the use of genetically engineered trans-
genic model systems, and provide future direction, including use of state-of-art
microarray and proteomics technology for the development of hair growth
promotion products.
