A team of researchers from MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School may have hit a breakthrough in the fight against alopecia areata, the disturbing autoimmune skin disease responsible for sudden hair loss in over 6 million Americans. According to a report from MIT News, scientists have developed a novel microneedle patch that could promote hair regrowth by reprogramming the immune system where it matters—right at the hair follicles.
The innovative treatment makes use of patches designed to painlessly release immune-regulating drugs directly onto the scalp. This local administration avoids the pitfalls of existing treatments, which, teeming with side effects, widely suppress the immune system. Natalie Artzi, a principal research scientist at MIT and associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute, shared, “This innovative approach marks a paradigm shift. Rather than suppressing the immune system, we’re now focusing on regulating it precisely at the site of antigen encounter to generate immune tolerance.”
Current alopecia therapies, often involving painful steroid injections or oral immunosuppressants with adverse effects, are a gamble on the patients' overall well-being. The benefit of relief from inflammation symptoms is trumped by an alarming increase in susceptibility to infections and serious health conditions, according to Artzi. The study, led by senior authors Natalie Artzi and Jamil R. Azzi, associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, appeared in the journal Advanced Materials, shedding light on the potential of targeted immune tolerance.
Mice treated with the patch showed promising outcomes—a flourish of regulatory T cells and decreased inflammation, enabling hair regrowth that lasted weeks beyond treatment. All the while, the systemic immune response elsewhere remained unchanged, a significant win for the focused therapy approach. "The skin is the only organ in our body that we can see and touch, and yet when it comes to drug delivery to the skin, we revert to systemic administration. We saw great potential in utilizing the microneedle patch to reprogram the immune system locally,” lamented Azzi.
Moreover, the designed patches not only deliver but can also retrieve samples from the application site for progress monitoring. Once the hyaluronic acid needles, crosslinked with PEG, swell after skin penetration, they capture interstitial fluid for analysis.
The team involved in this significant development is currently establishing a company to propel the technology forward, with Nuria Puigmal at the helm, recently honored with a Harvard Business School Blavatnik Fellowship. The research received funding from the Ignite Fund and Shark Tank Fund awards from the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
