May 21st 2020 –
When I became a board-certified physician in Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, it was as though someone had cleaned my sunglasses. I functioned very well as a dermatologist, but now I worked even better with a new set of resources and so much more information from which to pull that could better assist my patients!
One of the most exciting areas I am seeing so many successful patient outcomes, is through the use of exosome technology for hair loss, especially the androgenetic variant, or what is more commonly termed male and female pattern baldness. At the World Congress for Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, I was fortunate to be able to listen to Dr. Daniel Pompa discuss his personal journey on the road of first, wonderful health and then deterioration, and then eventual re-acclimation of that good health through careful research and hard work. One of the interesting points in his discussion was the use exosome technology after a life-threatening spinal injury that should have, at best, left his adolescent son, paralyzed, and at worst, dead. Not only did he survive, but he, was up and walking in a matter of three weeks, in a large part due to exosomes!!
Exosomes are extremely tiny particles (almost 1/1000th the size of an actual cell) that are capable of many things, but most importantly they can carry out cellular communication between cells and encourage messenger RNA to carry out its function of cellular regeneration. When thinking back to biology 101, messenger RNA was the key to allowing DNA to replicate. Messenger RNA was the template that allowed any type of DNA to duplicate itself. Thus, if one wanted to recreate bone cells as in the case of a damaged spine after a horrific injury of a teenager was trying to leap into a lake from a high cliff and misjudged and fell onto a rock instead, you can recreate bone cells. In the case of new hair cells at the site of the hair follicle, one could recreate new hair. In the case of collagen formation in an aging face, one can create new collagen and simply reverse the signs of aging. Essentially, the options of regenerative medicine using exosome are endless. Think of exosome technology as the future of regenerative medicine. They are literally our Fountain of Youth!
Exosomes also work extremely quickly. As opposed to some of the other technologies that we have used in the past, such as platelet rich plasma alone, it often can take up to four months to see hair regrowth in the same type of patient. With exosome technology, we are seeing regrowth after only 4 weeks. Remember the boy who got up after crushing spinal injury after only 3 weeks? That is unbelievable, but it has to do with the speed with which the exosomes can repair and rebuild damaged tissue. Of course, I left out some of the other things in the lecture that Dr. Pompa’s son also did on his rapid road to recovery which were outside the realm of traditional tried and true medicine but, they did, in fact, work and he is living proof at aged 25 that Regenerative Medicine is here to stay.
The pictures show a patient with androgenetic alopecia who chose to combine both exosome technology with platelet-rich plasma in a series of two injections spaced approximately 1 month apart. He then was quarantined away from us during the COVID-19 pandemic so we were unable to see his results until he came in for a completely unrelated follow up. His results were typical of what we see so I thought it appropriate to share this at the time of this writing.