Sixth Annual "World Hair Transplant Repair Day" on November 11 Assists Victims of Black-Market Hair Transplants, Empowers People to Spot Warning Signs

• Black-market hair transplant clinics are spreading – where unregulated individuals are illegally performing surgery that should only be done by a trained physician
• Patients are lured with steep discounts and fake photos of patient results, oftentimes with devastating results and little to no recourse
• The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery is committed to raising awareness of this worldwide problem and connecting victims with potential corrective surgeries

CHICAGO, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- To combat the alarming trend of fraudulent hair transplant clinics operating around the world under the false pretense of a legal, physician-performed medical establishment, the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS) has emerged as a leading voice in sounding the alarm about this widespread problem and providing people with the tools they need to make educated decisions about their hair restoration surgery.

On November 11, 2026, the ISHRS will host its sixth annual "World Hair Transplant Repair Day" to help victims of black-market hair transplants in need of corrective surgeries. Through the campaign's website, HairTransplantRepairDay.org, affected individuals can connect with participating volunteer ISHRS physicians for a chance to receive a pro bono corrective hair transplant procedure. Since its inception in 2020, the number of ISHRS participating physician members has increased to approximately 100 members around the world.

This worldwide event is part of the ISHRS's Fight the Fight global consumer awareness campaign that features educational resources available in more than a dozen languages, including blog posts, live stream replays, patient case studies, FAQs, a comprehensive guide to help patients choose a hair transplant surgeon, and physician interviews.

"The goal of this campaign is to not only raise awareness of these unscrupulous black-market hair transplant clinics, but also to empower patients struggling with hair loss to make confident, educated decisions about whose hands they trust with the expertise required for hair restoration surgery," said Robin Unger, MD, FISHRS, president of the ISHRS. "Every patient deserves a safe hair restoration surgery, and a physician's surgical skill, artistry, and medical training are the standard without exception."

Under the new tagline Safe Hair Transplant Surgery Starts Here, the ISHRS is unveiling a series of new, multi-language digital ads promoting messaging essential to the overarching theme of the campaign:

• Showing patients what safe hair transplant surgery requires: medical training, surgical skill, artistic judgment, and physician accountability – while continuing to address black-market deception and its risks
• How the emotional and physical consequences of trusting the wrong clinic are permanent
• How fraudulent operators disappear, while real surgeons are registered, traceable, and accountable
• Why medical care with a physician is a lifetime relationship, not a one-day transaction

"Our data show that there has been an increase in the number of black-market hair transplant clinics in cities around the world. This has resulted in many instances of hair transplants done incorrectly. In some instances, patients have suffered severe medical issues and in others the aesthetic results have been poor. ISHRS members are assisting these patients with corrective surgery," said Paul T. Rose, MD, JD, FISHRS, chair of the ISHRS Fight the Fight Subcommittee. "This is why knowing whose hands and eyes you are relying on is imperative to a safe and successful surgery."

Frequently Asked Questions

How can patients avoid falling victim to a black-market hair transplant clinic?
The ISHRS urges patients to do their homework before undergoing hair restoration surgery. Patients should research the physician who will perform their surgery and verify their medical credentials with the local medical professional licensing authority. Patients also need to understand which portions of the hair restoration surgery need to be performed by a properly trained and licensed physician, and which tasks can be legally delegated to qualified medical technicians.

What are the risks of black-market hair transplants?
There are numerous risks to patients who undergo a black-market hair transplant, all of which jeopardize patient safety and outcomes. Consequences of hair transplants performed illegally can include permanent visible scarring, infection, thin patches of hair, bald spots, and over-harvested donor areas that can be very difficult to correct. In cases where damage can be fixed, patients will often require more than one corrective procedure.

How common are repair cases due to black-market hair transplants?
According to the ISHRS 2025 Practice Census, 59% of surveyed ISHRS members reported black-market hair transplant clinics operating in their cities in 2024, compared with 51% in 2021. Members also reported that an average of 10% of their repair cases in 2024 involved a previous black-market hair transplant, compared with 6% in 2021.

What is World Hair Transplant Repair Day?
Held annually on November 11, World Hair Transplant Repair Day is an ISHRS initiative designed to raise awareness of the dangers of black-market hair transplant clinics while helping connect victims with trained hair restoration surgeons for a chance to receive a pro bono corrective hair transplant procedure.

Where can consumers learn more?
The ISHRS's Fight the Fight campaign provides educational resources in more than a dozen languages, patient case studies, archived educational livestreams, and information designed to help consumers make informed decisions about hair restoration surgery.

About the ISHRS
The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS) is a global non-profit medical association and the leading authority on hair loss treatment and restoration with 1,200 members throughout 80 countries worldwide. Above all, the ISHRS is dedicated to achieving excellence in patient outcomes by promoting the highest standards of medical practice, medical ethics, and research in the medical hair restoration industry. The ISHRS also provides continuing medical education to physicians specializing in hair transplant surgery and is committed to delivering the latest information on medical and surgical treatments to consumers suffering from hair loss, and most commonly from androgenetic alopecia – male pattern baldness and female pattern hair loss. It was founded in 1993 as the first international society to promote continuing quality improvement and education for professionals in the field of hair restoration surgery. For more information and to locate a physician, visit www.ishrs.org. 

About the Survey
Conducted by Relevant Research Consulting of Evanston, IL, USA, the ISHRS 2025 Practice Census is a compilation of information provided solely by participating physicians. The information published in this survey was developed from actual historical information and does not include any projected information. The margin of error for the sample is within plus or minus 5.4 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. For a full reprint of the ISHRS 2025 Practice Census Report, visit Hair Restoration Statistics. 

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Sixth Annual "World Hair Transplant Repair Day" on November 11 Assists Victims of Black-Market Hair Transplants, Empowers People to Spot Warning Signs

Sixth Annual "World Hair Transplant Repair Day" on November 11 Assists Victims of Black-Market Hair Transplants, Empowers People to Spot Warning Signs

A state-of-the-art general-purpose model in its class, built through automated AI research and designed to advance AI and scientific discovery.

BEIJING, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Apex Intelligence has released Apex-35B-V1.0, its first model. Built on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and further developed through mid-training and post-training, the 35B general-purpose model incorporates extensive proprietary datasets and research trajectories.

According to Apex Intelligence's evaluations, Apex-35B-V1.0 leads the similarly sized models tested in research and development capabilities while maintaining strong general-purpose performance. On selected benchmarks, it is competitive with substantially larger models.

AI participated autonomously in the model's development, including data construction, experiment design, code execution, analysis of training results and training optimization. Apex-35B-V1.0 can perform coding, agent workflows, question answering and deep search. It can also carry out end-to-end computational research workflows in AI research, computational science and robotics simulation.

Benchmark performance

Across 21 benchmarks, Apex-35B-V1.0 outperformed the similarly sized Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on 20 and Recursive Flint (40B) on 18, tying Recursive Flint on one. Beyond its strong performance on research tasks, the model demonstrated broad competitiveness in agentic tasks, coding, and reasoning, and surpassed larger models on selected benchmarks. Further details are available in the technical article.

Tech Blog：https://www.apexin.com/apex-35b/

Building Apex-35B-V1.0 Through Recursive Self-Improvement

Apex Intelligence developed Apex Research, an automated research system designed to enable recursive self-improvement. The system identifies model weaknesses, generates hypotheses, runs experiments and turns findings into measurable improvements. It contributed to the development of Apex-35B-V1.0 through self-evolving training data, automated experimentation, training recipes, GPU kernels and inference optimization.

Apex Research generates targeted training data to address weaknesses revealed by evaluation. When evaluations identified failures in computational fluid dynamics, the system analyzed the reasoning gaps, synthesized and validated new scientific training examples, and incorporated them into subsequent training rounds. Apex Intelligence reports that this process improved performance on its internal CFD-Bench by 32.1 points.

The system also analyzes evaluation results and agent trajectories to identify recurring failure patterns and refine training strategies. After identifying excessively long reasoning contexts and imbalanced data mixtures as factors affecting agent performance, it explored sequence-length distributions, short-to-long trajectory sampling ratios and token-aware batch compositions to improve agent reliability and training efficiency.

Apex Research extends this optimization to training and inference infrastructure. On the training side, its work on GPU load balancing, communication and computation overlap, dynamic batching, and token-aware workload distribution delivered 45–60% higher training throughput, according to Apex Intelligence. On the inference side, optimizations to attention kernels, KV-cache management and prefill/decode execution delivered 1.6–1.8 times faster decoding and 30–35% lower time to first token under comparable workloads.

Together, these improvements across data, training and infrastructure form a feedback loop in which each research iteration supports the next.

Availability

The weights for Apex-35B-V1.0 are available on Hugging Face. Accompanying code, a deployment guide and usage examples are available on GitHub. Developers can download and run the model for AI development, scientific computing and other research tasks. Model versions, hardware requirements, supported inference frameworks and licensing information are detailed on the project pages.

GitHub：https://github.com/apexin-ai/Apex-35B-V1.0

Hugging Face：https://huggingface.co/Apexintelligence-AI/Apex-35B-V1.0

About Apex Intelligence and what comes next

Apex Intelligence was founded by Yongchao Chen, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University's College of AI. The company aims to build the next generation of self-evolving foundation models for research. By "self-evolving," it means enabling AI to participate in research, experimentation and validation, then using the resulting discoveries to improve the model itself.

Apex Intelligence aims to advance AI from an assistant to a research collaborator capable of contributing to new discoveries. Its long-term vision is to develop models whose collective research capability matches and progressively surpasses that of 100,000 leading AI scientists across disciplines.

Following Apex-35B-V1.0, the company plans to release a larger self-evolving foundation model with stronger AI research capabilities and expanded applications in scientific fields including chip design and quantum computing. Apex Intelligence plans to announce further details on the model's capabilities, benchmark results and availability.

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Apex Intelligence Releases Apex-35B-V1.0, a General-Purpose Model Built With Automated AI Research