New Treatment for Color Dilution Alopecia?

My blue beagle is 2.5 years old and has color dilution alopecia (CDA). Symptoms of thinning hair first began to show around 6 months. Today, these thinning spots are nearly devoid of hair. I love my balding beagle no matter what, but I do have a question about recent developments in alopecia pharmaceuticals: In June 2022, however, the FDA "approved Olumiant (baricitinib) oral tablets to treat adult patients with severe alopecia areata, a disorder that often appears as patchy baldness and affects more than 300,000 people in the U.S. each year." On average, human patients saw the hair on their scalp increase from 50% to 80% in 36 weeks. Today, at least two other similar drugs are in the testing/approval pipeline (Pfizer's ritlecitinib and Concert's deuruxolitinib), which are expected to compete with Eli Lilly's Olumiant. To my understanding, hair loss from CDA is generally thought to be irreversible. And I understand there might be some significant differences between CDA in dogs and alopecia areata in humans. But have any veterinarians tried treating CDA yet with the Olumiant?

Hello!  This is a fascinating question and I'd love to understand the background as to how you came to ask it.   From a GP vet perspective, baldness is quite unusual in dogs and most cases get accounted for.  Indeed, often it can be successfully treated.  Vets should perform deep scrapes for demodex mites, rule out ringworm, endocrine diseases and so on.  I simply don't encounter many dogs with unexplained baldness, so I wonder if there would be much of a market for this.

With apologies, having reread your question.....

To my understanding, Colour Dilution Baldness is a double-recessive genetic condition.   Careful management of breeding would perhaps be more to the point than humans breeding a change into a population and then researching ongoing, expensive treatment to try to resolve it.  I am unaware of any work going into this area at the moment - and don't know enough about the mechanism of the drug or the baldness to say whether or not it would work - but it is a niche area and potentially controversial.