Why Is The Skin's Role As A "barrier" Bad For Hair Loss Drugs?

[Gone]

Shortening this post.

Why are drugs that cannot penetrate scalp skin considered inviable, when the drug can still move through follicular openings to the hair follicles? What prevents people from using a drug/vehicle that is capable of follicular delivery but not through the scalp skin?

 

[Swoop]

There are three general routes that make drug penetration happen through the skin. Look at the picture below.

1. Is just through the stratum corneum. Many small molecule drugs can do this given that they are low in molecular weight. The more lipophilic they are, the better. They will disperse into the dermis after. An example is topical minoxidil.

2. Is the follicular delivery route you are talking about. This can only happen if the particle size is small enough. Think of formulations that have nanosomes/liposomes. Now a normal minoxidil formulation won't be able to go through the hair follicle openings. But you can load minoxidil into a nanosome formulation so that the particle size would be small enough to be able to go through the follicular route.

 

[hairblues]

@Swoop

I looked up spironolactone molecular mass and it came up as 416.574 g/mol

does that penetrate?

here is estrodial 272.382 g/mol

 

[rclark]

There are three general routes that make drug penetration happen through the skin. Look at the picture below.

1. Is just through the stratum corneum. Many small molecule drugs can do this given that they are low in molecular weight. The more lipophilic they are, the better. They will disperse into the dermis after. An example is topical minoxidil.

2. Is the follicular delivery route you are talking about. This can only happen if the particle size is small enough. Think of formulations that have nanosomes/liposomes. Now a normal minoxidil formulation won't be able to go through the hair follicle openings. But you can load minoxidil into a nanosome formulation so that the particle size would be small enough to be able to go through the follicular route.

Does the latter have any hope/or any scientific discoveries that full under number two?

 

[abcdefg]

This topic is actually a pretty important one. Things like topical spironolactone and numerous other topicals could all be failing because they just arent delivered right. The different layers of skin themselves like the dermal layer is a complicated 3d matrix of skin so the exact properties of that I dont know, but its not an easy thing to get consistent penetration to where it needs to be, and keep there long enough to get used.

 

[mr_robot]

I remember menthol being mentioned as a penetration enhancer when I was doing my research on peppermint oil.

 

[kj6723]

Good thread. This is why I've added peppermint oil and tretinoin to my regimen, because success stories on here lead me to believe increased penetration has the potential to take minoxidil effectiveness to another level