A New Era of Hair Loss Treatment
For years now, some scientists have been studying whether a class of drugs already used to treat autoimmune conditions, known as JAK inhibitors, might also be able to help with a certain type of hair loss known as alopecia areata. In June, the Food and Drug Administration finally validated this work when it approved baricitinib as the first JAK inhibitor for severe alopecia areata.
Alopecia areata is thought to affect as many as 7 million Americans, and while some people can benefit from existing treatments, there hadn’t been any specific drugs that attack the root cause of the condition (an overactive immune system) available to them until now. Those with severe alopecia areata can lose all the hair along the body and scalp. In clinical trials, baricitinib was found to restore substantial amounts of hair to about a third of these patients on the highest dose.
The approval is unlikely to be the only of its kind, as other and possibly even more effective JAK inhibitors are now being studied in clinical trials.
