By Carly Osborne, CEO, Monpure London
Every year, people complete a course of radiotherapy, for cancer and for other conditions, and then face something nobody warned them enough about. Their hair does not grow back. When radiation damages a follicle badly enough, the loss can be permanent, and current science cannot reverse it. What is striking is how little research exists into whether that damage could be prevented in the first place. Working with the University of Manchester, Monpure is trying to change that. It is one of the reasons I took the job as CEO.
This touches all of us
Cancer is not a distant problem. It is not something that only happens to other people, in other lives. One in two of us will be diagnosed at some point. And those of us who are not will almost certainly sit beside someone we love while they are: a parent, a partner, a friend, a colleague. There is barely a person alive for whom this is genuinely abstract.
I think what a society chooses to study says a lot about whose experiences it treats as worth understanding. This is an area that deserves more attention than it gets. We are trying to give it some.
Since joining Monpure
I have spoken with a lot of people who have lost their hair through illness or treatment. The constant, every time, is how deeply it affects them. Hair is part of who we are and how we show up in the world. It is the one thing we wear every single day. When it is taken, it changes how people feel about themselves, and how they imagine they are seen.
Survival comes first. But you should not have to give up your sense of self to get there.
Those conversations are part of why I am writing this. They are also why I do not treat Monpure's investment in this research as a line in a strategy deck. For me it is personal.
What we are doing, and what we are not
We have worked with researchers at the University of Manchester for over three years, funding work that aims to understand how radiotherapy damages the follicle, and whether that damage can be protected against. It is foundational, long-term science. We do not know what it will produce. We are funding it anyway.
About the research
The work is independent, academically rigorous and long-term. We are not paying for it in the hope of a product we can sell next year. We are paying for it because the question matters, and because the people it might one day help deserve to have someone taking it seriously.
Our yearly contribution to this research is one of the largest financial commitments we make as a business, more than a third of our total advertising budget this year. We are not a big company. That makes it a deliberate decision about where our money goes.
We are here because the science matters, because the people affected by it matter, and because we were in a position to help and decided to.
What this says about us
Monpure was built on a simple conviction: that the scalp deserves to be taken seriously, as skin, as biology, as something worth understanding deeply rather than just managing on the surface. That belief runs through the work we do with trichologists who care for patients across every kind of hair and scalp concern. It shapes our formulations, which follow what we see clinically rather than what is easiest to sell. And it sits at the heart of what we call Hair Longevity Science: a commitment to understanding the scalp and the follicle at the level of prevention and long-term health, not just short-term results.
An open invitation
If you are a clinician, a researcher, a trichologist or an advocate working in this field, we would genuinely welcome a conversation. We would love to hear what you are working on and where you think the science needs to go next.
We will keep funding this research for as long as it takes. Not because we know where it leads, but because we believe it matters. For us, that is reason enough.
Carly Osborne
CEO, Monpure London
May 2026
