Baldness may soon be a thing of the past; researchers have finally found a way to "generate new hair growth."
The technique is expected to be exceptionally helpful for women suffering from hair loss. These women usually have "insufficient donor hair," meaning hair from another part of the scalp, a Columbia University Medical Center news release reported.
"This method offers the possibility of inducing large numbers of hair follicles or rejuvenating existing hair follicles, starting with cells grown from just a few hundred donor hairs. It could make hair transplantation available to individuals with a limited number of follicles, including those with female-pattern hair loss, scarring alopecia, and hair loss due to burns," co-study leader Angela M. Christiano, PhD, the Richard and Mildred Rhodebeck Professor of Dermatology and professor of genetics & development, said.
Current treatments tend to only slow down the progression of hair loss, instead of regenerating hair.
"Dermal papilla cells give rise to hair follicles, and the notion of cloning hair follicles using inductive dermal papilla cells has been around for 40 years or so," co-study leader Colin Jahoda, PhD, professor of stem cell sciences at Durham University, and co-director of North East England Stem Cell Institute, said. "However, once the dermal papilla cells are put into conventional, two-dimensional tissue culture, they revert to basic skin cells and lose their ability to produce hair follicles. So we were faced with a Catch-22: how to expand a sufficiently large number of cells for hair regeneration while retaining their inductive properties."
The researchers found that rodent hair was easier to transplant, most likely because their dermal papillae "spontaneously aggregate, or form clumps, in tissue culture," which human papillae does not.
"This suggested that if we cultured human papillae in such a way as to encourage them to aggregate the way rodent cells do spontaneously, it could create the conditions needed to induce hair growth in human skin," first author Claire A. Higgins, PhD, associate research scientist, said.
The team successfully transplanted cloned cells into human skin that had been grafted onto mice. DNA proved that real human hair that matched the donor grew on the rodents' backs and lasted for at least six weeks.
"This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss," Dr. Christiano, said. "Current hair-loss medications tend to slow the loss of hair follicles or potentially stimulate the growth of existing hairs, but they do not create new hair follicles. Neither do conventional hair transplants, which relocate a set number of hairs from the back of the scalp to the front. Our method, in contrast, has the potential to actually grow new follicles using a patient's own cells. This could greatly expand the utility of hair restoration surgery to women and to younger patients-now it is largely restricted to the treatment of male-pattern baldness in patients with stable disease."
The method will require more testing before it can be tried out on humans, but the researchers are optimistic of future clinical trials.
