BOSTON (The Boston Globe) - Fur today, hair tomorrow? That's the hope of Boston researchers who have harnessed a natural process strongly associated with cancer research, called angiogenesis, to grow 70 percent thicker fur on laboratory mice.

Now the big question is whether they can restore balding pates in people.

"Applying it to humans will be the big challenge," said Dr. Michael Detmar, a dermatologist and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, who is publishing a report on the mouse feat.

But if Detmar's method succeeds in people, it would make him a hero to the estimated 35 million American men who are losing or have lost their hair. Currently, their options are limited to hair transplants, scalp reduction surgery and the drugs Minoxidil and Propecia - none of which can promise to regrow significant amounts of hair.

Detmar's team genetically engineered mice to make excessive amounts of a natural protein, VEGF, that enlarges blood vessels near the roots of individual hairs. They shaved fur from these mice and from normal mice, and compared how quickly it grew back.

The VEGF-enhanced mice regrew hair quicker, and, better yet, researchers found that their hair follicles - the structures at the roots of hairs - were 30 percent wider.

"By overall volume, the hair was about 70 percent thicker" than in the normal mice, Detmar said, adding, "To my knowledge, no one has been able to make hair thicker" previously.

Detmar got the idea that angiogenesis might be a treatment for baldness by observing human hair growth patterns. At any given time, he explained, only about 85 percent of the hairs on an average head are growing, while the rest are dormant. He noticed that the follicles in actively growing hairs were thicker and the blood vessels were larger. In the months-long resting phase, the follicles and the blood vessels shrink.

In male-pattern baldness, genetic factors cause many dormant follicles to shrink to the point that they grow only fine hair or no hair at all. "If anyone could find a way to make the follicles bigger, men might grow hair again," said Detmar.

It's a new and different application of research on angiogenesis, pioneered at Children's Hospital by Dr. Judah Folkman, and applied mainly to cancer and heart disease thus far. Pro-angiogenesis factors spur new blood vessel growth - an experimental treatment for heart disease - and anti-angiogenesis factors turn the growth off. The latter strategy is being tested as a means of cutting off tumors' blood supply.

The report, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by Detmar, Kiichiro Yano of MGH and Dr. Lawrence F. Brown of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, could add yet another condition that is affected by angiogenesis, which Folkman believes is involved in dozens of diseases, including arthritis and forms of blindness.

VEGF is a chemical signal the body sends to nearby blood vessels to extend new vessels to an area. Researchers are administering it to patients with blocked heart arteries to encourage new blood vessels to grow. And drugs that block VEGF are showing some effectiveness in experiments aimed at starving cancerous tumors to death.

However, to work in treating baldness, the VEGF protein would have to be applied topically - which could be expensive, Detmar said. He is also trying another approach, getting follicle cells to make their own VEGF.

Dr. Norman Orentreich, a New York aging researcher who performed the first hair transplants in the United States, said, "This is a very good basic paper and the next step is to test it in an animal model of male pattern baldness."

He said that at the Cold Spring (N.Y.) Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science, he and other researchers have bred a strain of mouse that develops pattern baldness, a natural test subject for the effectiveness of VEGF.

He said the MGH scientists' theory was sound. "We know that an increase in blood supply will increase hair growth, and any decrease in blood supply will decrease hair growth."

In fact, that's the theory behind barbers' longstanding recommendations that balding men massage their scalps, although there is little evidence to prove it works.

"It certainly can't hurt you, and it makes all the sense in the world that it's going to stimulate the scalp," said Nestor Real, owner of Diego, a Boston hair salon.

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