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Keeping tissue alive during any sort of long-term transportation has always been difficult until fairly recently. This is especially true for hair restoration procedures, where hair follicles must survive as they are removed from one area of the scalp and transplanted onto another. The easiest way to protect these hair follicles from outside contaminants and other environmental factors is to place them inside of a chilled solution. HypoThermosol was first introduced into the field of hair restoration by Dr. Jerry Cooley in Charlottle, North Carolina. It is the brand name of storage solution made by Bio Life Solutions that is becoming the industry standard for hair transplants for a number of reasons.
During a hair transplant surgery, a follicular unit consisting of multiple hair follicles is first removed from an area of the scalp with healthy, transplantable hair (this area is known as the donor zone), and subsequently placed onto an area of the scalp with hair loss (this area is known as the recipient scalp).
When the follicular units are being transported from the donor zone to recipient scalp, a number of conditions can damage the follicular units and render them unusable.
Traditionally, hair transplant have relied on chilled sterilized saline as the preferred method of storage solution for follicular hair units. While saline will prevent the follicular units from dehydrating, it does not offer any of the nutritional sustenance that the follicular unit enjoys while in the scalp. A recent 2015 study left follicular unit grafts outside of the body for ninety-six hours in either normal saline or HypoThermosol with ATP. When they were transplanted into the recipient scalp, researchers found that a larger number of hairs that used HypoThermosol with ATP survived.
