Development and Evaluation for Hair Growth Stimulants: The Past and the Future

Abstract

The market scale of hair growth stimulants including medicines and quasi-drugs in Japan was 67.5 billion yen at 2016. It is expected that the market of hair growth stimulant for women will be bigger in future. Therefore, the market needs to develop new hair growth stimulants. Nowadays, it is difficult to develop novel medicines or novel quasi-drugs for hair growth, because the wave of animal experiment abolition is getting bigger in the world-wide cosmetics industry. Under such circumstances, despite authorities approving over 30 active quasi-drugs in the field of hair tonic products, most of these drugs are not fully utilized. It will be important that we reevaluate these approved active ingredients. And, the importance of digging out the approved quasi-drugs is expected to increase in the future. In this lecture, I would like to describe a reassessment of approved active quasi-drugs for hair growth and its evaluation methods.