Williams is working with Hair Clone, a British company that believes it will perfect the science of cloning hair.
“The typical candidate would be someone who has had multiple surgeries and can’t have any more hair transplantations, but they have lots of areas of balding," Williams explains.
Doctors would harvest 50 hair follicles and send them to a cryopreservation tank in England. Surgeons there would remove the hair shaft from the bulb, which holds cells that control growth. Then, the cells are multiplied, in a special cell culture.
“Then, when the patient is ready, they have the actual transplantation. They would let us know and we’d go through the process of replication, and getting those 50 cells will now turn into 1500 cells,” Williams says.
The trial would cost Ric between $4,000-$10,000 plus air fare to England, where he’d get his cloned hair. England is the only western country that allows this type of treatment.
Williams says hair cloning is the next biggest frontier in hair science. Hair Clone hopes to start a small trial in England later this year.
The good news is that companies around the world are racing to start hair cloning trials as soon as they can.
