Baldness could soon be a thing of the past.
A team of Japanese researchers has successfully grown mature hair follicles in a lab, an advancement in the battle against hair loss.
Scientists from Yokohama National University — who have been studying hair follicle growth and hair pigmentation — generated hair follicles in petri dishes using embryonic skin cells from mice cultured in a special type of gel.
The findings were published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
“If you think of a hair follicle, it’s got the hair down the middle of it and then it’s got layers of epithelial cells around the follicle and other specialized cells,” one cell biologist not involved in the study told New Scientist about the breakthrough. “The gel allows these cells to grow in a laboratory in a way that means they can climb over and around each other” like they do in the body.
Interactions between epithelial cells, which form the outer layer of the skin, and connective tissue, or mesenchyme, trigger hair follicle formation as an embryo develops. This study revealed that controlling these interactions is key.
In the lab, the hair shafts grew to 3 millimeters over the course of 23 days.
“Our next step is to use cells from human origin, and apply for drug development and regenerative medicine,” Yokohama professor Junji Fukuda said in a statement.
The procedure has not been tested using human cells, but the discovery is a step toward understanding hair-loss disorders and finding new hair-growth drugs.