The Role of Lipids in Promoting Hair Growth - Hopefully Saying Goodbye to “Baldness”

People today are under great pressure in life, and their hair is often in urgent need of attention! Recently, a study published in Sci Rep, "The role of lipids in promoting hair growth through HIF-1 signaling pathway", has brought exciting new discoveries to the field of hair loss treatment - lipids play a key role in promoting hair growth, and this process is closely related to the HIF-1 signaling pathway.

The metabolic balance of cells is essential to maintaining normal physiological functions. Among them, lipid metabolism not only provides energy for cells, but also participates in the construction of cell structure and signal transduction. As an extremely active tissue in the human body, the growth cycle of hair follicles includes growth phase, regression phase and resting phase. During this process, the number of fat cells around the hair follicles will change regularly. Previous studies have shown that lipid metabolism may be associated with hair follicle growth, but the specific mechanism is still unclear. This study focuses on this and aims to further explore the potential connection between lipid metabolism and hair growth.

The researchers first analyzed the scalp tissue of patients with androgenic alopecia (AGA). Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) revealed that the enrichment of genes related to fatty acid metabolism in the scalp tissue of AGA patients was significantly lower than that in healthy people. This result preliminarily suggests that there may be a positive correlation between lipid metabolism and hair growth and regeneration. In other words, normal lipid metabolism may play a positive role in promoting hair growth.

Fig. 1 Fatty acid metabolism is disrupted in scalp tissues of individuals with AGA (Seo, Jieun, et al. 2025).

Then, the researchers turned their attention to human dermal papilla cells (DPCs). When a lipid mixture (LM) was added to the culture medium of DPCs, surprising changes occurred: the expression of many genes closely related to hair growth, such as alkaline phosphatase (ALP), versican (VCAN) and lymphoid enhancer factor 1 (LEF1), was significantly enhanced. At the same time, the proliferation of DPCs was also activated, and the expression of cell proliferation markers and fatty acid metabolism-related genes was upregulated. This series of results fully demonstrates that lipid supplementation can effectively activate DPCs, thereby promoting hair growth.

Fig. 2 Fatty acids are involved in improving the function and growth of DPCs (Seo, Jieun, et al. 2025).

So, by what mechanism do lipids affect DPCs? The researchers further found that LM treatment can significantly upregulate signaling pathways such as PI3K-Akt and Ras, which are closely related to the translation regulation of HIF-1α protein. Subsequent experiments confirmed that LM can increase the expression level of HIF-1α in a dose-dependent manner. More importantly, when HIF-1α was silenced using siRNA, the upregulation of hair growth genes by LM completely disappeared. This phenomenon clearly shows that the effect of lipids on the expression of hair growth genes is achieved through the HIF-1α pathway.

In order to further verify the effect of lipids on the actual growth of hair, the researchers used hair follicle organoids for experiments. The results showed that in the experimental group with the addition of LM, the elongation rate of the hair shaft-like structure in the hair follicle organoids was significantly faster than that in the control group without the addition of LM. This experimental result directly proves that regulating lipids in DPCs can promote epithelial cell-mediated hair shaft formation, providing a new theoretical basis and potential direction for the treatment of hair loss.

Fig. 3 Lipids promote hair shaft sprouting in hair follicle organoids (Seo, Jieun, et al. 2025).

In general, this study reveals the important role of lipids in promoting hair growth and the HIF-1 signaling pathway mechanism behind it. This discovery has opened up a new research direction for hair loss treatment. In the future, it may be possible to prepare hair follicles with hair shafts in vitro by supplementing lipids for use in hair transplantation.