Accidental Find May lead to a cure for baldness

http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/02/accidental-find-may-lead-to-a-cure-for-baldness-2/

Science is full of stories in which great discoveries are made by accident: The discovery of radiation, the discovery of the universe's shape through x-ray detection, and... the cure for hair loss?
Maybe.

At the time they returned to the cages to find that their bald mice had miraculously grown their hair back, the scientists at UCLA had no intention of curing baldness. Originally, theirs was in fact a study aimed at reducing the harmful effects of chronic stress. The unanticipated side effect of their treatment could prove a boon to balding men and women everywhere, not to mention to the drug company that delivers the cure to them.

Stress is beneficial in small doses, heightening our ability to run away from predators or to concentrate while taking an exam. But chronic stress can bring about an array of mental or physical disorders such as high blood pressure, anxiety disorders, rheumatic deseases, muscle pain, a weakened immune system and neurodegenerative diseases. Chronic stress also causes our hair to fall out.

The UCLA team was investigating the role of corticotropin-releasing factor in the stress. CRF is one of a number of hormones that mediate the body's stress response. Secreted from the hypothalamus, CRF acts at various sites in the brain and other parts of the body to mediate the stress response. In the gut, CRF stimulates a colonic stress response that include motility, defecation, and diarrhea. But animal models of high anxiety show that elevated CRF can exacerbate irritable bowel syndrome. Trying to find a way to block these effects, Tache's team employed a mouse genetically altered to produce abnormally high levels of CRF. These mice always lost their hair, initially a side effect of little importance to the researchers. In an effort to allay the harmful effects of elevated CRF Tache's team injected the CRF-overexpressing mice with CRF blockers. They injected the mice once a day for five days then put them back in their cages. Three months later they returned to the cages to find that the once-bald mice had grown their hair back. Surprised, the researchers actually thought that someone had mixed up the mice. But going back to the records confirmed that these were indeed the same CRF-overexpressing mice. So then they reported the experiment and again turned bald mice into mice with backs of lush, full hair convincing to the touch, ready to step out into the field with a newly found confidence. The effect was fast, too.