DR GARY SCHWARTZ COLUMBIA SKIN
DR GARY SCHWARTZ COLUMBIA TRIAL

“This is a major step forward,” says David Bickers, MD, the Carl Truman Nelson Professor of Dermatology and chair of the Department of Dermatology at P&S. The drug stops the T cell attack on the follicles, and in three patients with severe disease, nearly all hair returned after up to six months of therapy.

DR GARY SCHWARTZ COLUMBIA TRIAL

In a paper published in Nature Medicine in August of this year, the two reported results from the first three participants in a clinical trial directed by Julian Mackay-Wiggan, MD, assistant professor of dermatology and director of the department’s clinical research unit. Clynes and Christiano began collaborating and now, just four years later, they may be on the brink of delivering an effective drug treatment for the 6 million people in the United States with some form of the disease. It seemed like a simple problem to figure out, because it was confined to this one spot.”ĭrs. “I saw immediately that there was an elegance involved.

DR GARY SCHWARTZ COLUMBIA SKIN

“I remember the picture of a hair follicle swarmed by killer T cells, like bees attacking in a swarm-and the rest of the skin looked completely empty,” says Dr. Clynes, an expert in the study of cytotoxic (killer) T cells in diabetes. Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center researcher Domenico Accili recommended that Dr. “There’s a joke among geneticists that you can’t get an immunologist to return an email much less to talk to you,” says Dr. “We found a surprising overlap in genes linked to alopecia areata and autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.” Armed with these data and the pictures, she approached Dr. Christiano had reached a turning point in this search in 2010, after trawling the genomes of a thousand alopecia areata patients for new clues to the source of the disease. Finding new ways to treat alopecia areata and other hair loss conditions became her lab’s major focus.ĭr. Her hair eventually grew back, but it gave her a new research direction. The next two years were emotionally draining. Soon after joining the Department of Dermatology in 1996, “my hair started falling out in patches typical of alopecia areata,” she recalls. Christiano emphasizes with an unusual air of authority for a research scientist. It is true that no one dies from alopecia areata, but it is a life-altering disease, Dr. “It’s not life-threatening, so it’s believed that it’s not a big problem. “Alopecia areata can sometimes get pushed to the back burner,” Dr. And few researchers were pursuing the leads.

These basics of alopecia areata have been known for decades, but details that could lead to a treatment that restores hair growth were lacking. The pictures showed a swarm of T cells (lymphocytes) surrounding, and attacking, a hair follicle, a sure sign of the autoimmune disease. When geneticist Angela Christiano showed histological slides from the skin of a patient with the hair-loss disease alopecia areata to immunologist Raphael Clynes, “He scratched his head and said, ‘Why is no one working on this?”

Dr gary schwartz columbia