Health & Medicine
Promising Hair Restoration Treatment Gets Researchers a Step Closer to Cure Baldness [VIDEO]
Benita Matilda
First Posted: Oct 22, 2013 08:10 AM EDT
Hair-loss is a major issue for millions of men and women and yet there is no cure for this condition. Now, a team of scientists have devised a technique to grow hair. This finding gets the researchers a step closer in treating baldness.
A team of researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have devised a hair restoration method that can generate human hair growth rather than redistributing hair from one part of the scalp to another.
This is the first hair regeneration method to induce new human hair growth and this could expand the use of hair transplantation to women with hair loss and those who struggle with insufficient donor hair, making them a poor candidate for hair transplant treatment. The most exciting part of this method is that it can be used on men who are in the initial stages of baldness.
This new methods goes beyond hair transplants and the use of medication.
"This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss," said co-study leader Angela M. Christiano, PhD, the Richard and Mildred Rhodebeck Professor of Dermatology and professor of genetics & development. ".... 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 breakthrough came when researchers found that certain cells called the dermal papilla cells, trigger hair growth by giving rise to hair follicles. The concept of cloning hair follicles using inductive dermal papilla cells has been there for almost 40 years.
Dr. Jahoda earlier had found a technique of harvesting rodent papillae, expanding it and successfully transplanting it back into the rodent skin. The reason why rodent is readily transplantable is because they easily aggregate and form clumps. The formation of the clumps allows the papillae to interact and release signals that signal the recipient skin to grow new follicles.
"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," study co-author Claire A. Higgins, an associate research scientist at Columbia, said in a statement.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers harvested dermal papillae from seven human donors and cloned the cells in tissue culture. They didn't add any additional growth factors to the cultures. After a few days they transplanted the cultured papillae between the dermis and epidermis of the human skin that was grafted on the back of the mice. The transplants led to new hair growth in five out of the seven tests. They also conducted a DNA analysis that confirmed that the new hair follicle belonged to human and was genetically matching the donor.
"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."
The team plans on doing more tests before implementing it on humans. The team is optimistic that clinical trials could begin in the near future.
The findings were published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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First Posted: Oct 22, 2013 08:10 AM EDT
Hair-loss is a major issue for millions of men and women and yet there is no cure for this condition. Now, a team of scientists have devised a technique to grow hair. This finding gets the researchers a step closer in treating baldness.
A team of researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have devised a hair restoration method that can generate human hair growth rather than redistributing hair from one part of the scalp to another.
This is the first hair regeneration method to induce new human hair growth and this could expand the use of hair transplantation to women with hair loss and those who struggle with insufficient donor hair, making them a poor candidate for hair transplant treatment. The most exciting part of this method is that it can be used on men who are in the initial stages of baldness.
This new methods goes beyond hair transplants and the use of medication.
"This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss," said co-study leader Angela M. Christiano, PhD, the Richard and Mildred Rhodebeck Professor of Dermatology and professor of genetics & development. ".... 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 breakthrough came when researchers found that certain cells called the dermal papilla cells, trigger hair growth by giving rise to hair follicles. The concept of cloning hair follicles using inductive dermal papilla cells has been there for almost 40 years.
Dr. Jahoda earlier had found a technique of harvesting rodent papillae, expanding it and successfully transplanting it back into the rodent skin. The reason why rodent is readily transplantable is because they easily aggregate and form clumps. The formation of the clumps allows the papillae to interact and release signals that signal the recipient skin to grow new follicles.
"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," study co-author Claire A. Higgins, an associate research scientist at Columbia, said in a statement.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers harvested dermal papillae from seven human donors and cloned the cells in tissue culture. They didn't add any additional growth factors to the cultures. After a few days they transplanted the cultured papillae between the dermis and epidermis of the human skin that was grafted on the back of the mice. The transplants led to new hair growth in five out of the seven tests. They also conducted a DNA analysis that confirmed that the new hair follicle belonged to human and was genetically matching the donor.
"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."
The team plans on doing more tests before implementing it on humans. The team is optimistic that clinical trials could begin in the near future.
The findings were published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone