LG says its AI found a new hair-loss ingredient after searching 420,000 candidates in a day

Most AI demos still involve asking a chatbot to summarize an email, generate a picture, or even get medical advice on occasion. LG has a new assignment for the tech, and it’s about finding a better cure for hair loss. LG AI Research says its EXAONE Discovery system screened more than 420,000 candidate compounds in a single day and helped identify an ingredient called Rhamsydil in collaboration with LG Household & Health Care.

Developed with LG Household & Health Care, the material is being investigated for hair-loss care and is already being prepared for commercialization. LG says Rhamsydil could help with female-pattern hair loss by creating a scalp environment more conducive to hair growth, with plans to use the ingredient in products from its Dr.Groot scalp-care brand.

AI did the searching humans would normally spend much longer doing

EXAONE Discovery is essentially an AI system built specifically for materials research. It analyses molecular structures and scientific data to identify compounds that match the properties researchers want, narrowing an enormous search space before scientists move on to laboratory testing.

Rhamsydil demonstrated hair-loss prevention efficacy without steroid-derived compounds, with research on the ingredient presented at the World Congress for Hair Research. But that does not mean AI has suddenly produced a clinically proven cure for baldness. Furthermore, this ingredient for hair-loss care is moving towards commercialization.

Screening hundreds of thousands of potential compounds through conventional experiments would require extensive time and resources. LG’s new AI can help eliminate much of that initial trial-and-error by pointing researchers toward the candidates most worth investigating.

LG’s AI could run the lab next

Hair care is only one demonstration of what LG has in mind. EXAONE Discovery is already being applied to cosmetics, battery and semiconductor materials, pharmaceutical research, and immersion-cooling fluids for AI data centers. LG is now working toward an autonomous laboratory that combines AI-led candidate discovery with experiment planning, analysis, and robotic hardware capable of physically running experiments.

Rhamsydil is an eye-catching example, particularly for anyone watching their hairline creep backwards, but LG is trying to show how specialist AI could compress months or years of repetitive scientific searching into dramatically shorter development cycles. Though it remains to be seen what it can actually do for people’s hair.