WEDNESDAY, Oct. 29, 2025 (HealthDay News) — The same natural dye responsible for Lucille Ball’s signature red hair has pigments that might one day be used to treat serious liver disease.
Lawsonia inermis is a broadleaf evergreen best known for making henna, a dye used to change the color of hair, skin and clothes.
Writing in the October issue of the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, a team from Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan said pigments extracted from the dye could be used for liver fibrosis, a hard-to-treat disease often linked to excessive alcohol use.
In fibrosis, scar tissue builds up and replaces healthy tissue, putting patients at increased risk of liver failure, cancer and cirrhosis. Few treatments are available.
One potential treatment in which henna could play a role focuses on cells that normally maintain balance within the organ.
When these cells — known as hepatic stellate cells or HSCs — go haywire, they churn out excessive fibrous tissue and collagen, disrupting liver function.
Researcher Tsutomu Matsubara and his team developed a chemical screening system that identifies substances that act directly on these rogue HSCs. And that system found potential in lawsone, the red-orange dye molecule found in the henna tree.
In tests using mice, treatment with lawsone lowered key markers of liver fibrosis, including YAP and COL1A.
Further, the presence of a marker linked to antioxidant functions suggested HSCs were returning to non-fibrotic types, researchers said.
"By controlling fibroblast activity, including HSCs, we could potentially limit or even reverse the effects of fibrosis," Matsubara said in a news release.
His team is working to develop a way to deliver the drug to activated HSCs, with an eye to making it available one day for patients with fibrosis.
They said up to 4% of the population has an advanced form of the disease.
More information
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has information on the cosmetic use of henna.
SOURCE: Osaka Metropolitan University, news release, Oct. 27, 2025