The government has awarded a £1.85 million grant to a UK biotechnology firm based in Cambridge, to develop a robot to help treat baldness.

Intercytex has successfully tried and tested a method of removing hair follicles from the back of the neck, multiplying them and re-implanting the cells to the area needed.

The company stated that it had been awarded funding from the Department of Trade and Industry’s Technology Programme, which it planned to use to develop a robotic system to speed up the time consuming process of multiplying the hair cells before they are replanted.

The method could be used to treat male pattern baldness and alopecia in both sexes.

Working with The Automation Partnership, who developed the robotic system for the storage and growth of the cells, Intercytex hopes to develop the production of hair follicles known as dermal papilla cells, on a commercial scale.

The treatment was initially tested on seven men with male pattern baldness, five of whom grew hair and is now being tested on a further 20.

The process consists of a 30-minute operation, where hair follicles are taken from the back of the neck, then grown in culture until they number in thousands before being injected under the skin where the hair needs to grow back.

The most common form of baldness is activated by the male hormone dihydrotestosterone, which causes hair follicles to shrink and hair to thin, before it disappears altogether.

Intercytex chief executive Nick Higgins told the BBC that in male pattern baldness, the area at the back of the neck was unaffected by the hormone.

“We take a very small sample of the dermal papilla cells and then grow them in a special medium until we get ten thousand fold. Then we take a very fine needle and we inject them under the skin and the idea is at each point of injection a new hair will grow.

“The robot does two things - the cell culture growth phase takes about three weeks and involves lots of steps but we can programme it to do all the steps, and it can do 200 samples at once.

“The clever bit is we don’t want to give the wrong person the wrong hair back.”

Higgins also added that Intercytex would be testing the method for cases of alopecia, but stated it would be about three years before the treatment would be available to the general public.