A Cure for Baldness? New Treatment Moves a Step Closer (VIDEO)

It's a question that's plagued humans for thousands of years: How can we re-grow lost hair?

Fortunately, a new study that focuses on current hair-loss treatments found that hair growth can be stimulated to help both men and women fight the early-stages of baldness.

According to researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and colleagues, they found that a key to stimulating hair growth is to make human papillae grow in a similar fashion to rodent hair.

"About 90 percent of women with hair loss are not strong candidates for hair transplantation surgery because of insufficient donor hair. 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," said co-study leader Angela M. Christiano, PhD, the Richard and Mildred Rhodebeck Professor of Dermatology and professor of genetics & development.

As human skin is composed of many layers, with the outermost one being the epidermis, the dermal papillae are known as tiny protrusions of the dermis that go into the epidermis and play a vital role in supplying nutrients that help the skin pick up sensory data.

Thus the hair follicle is the skin organ that works to produce hair at the base of the hair follicle as a nerve fiber surrounded by each hair bulb. Sebaceous glands near the follicles also secrete oils that make up the condition of our hair, and with interaction between the epithelial cells and the dermal papilla cells, the hair growth cycle works to start and begin new creations.

With this in mind, scientists' idea for hair cloning involves the use of the dermal papilla--something that isn't exactly new, as they note that it's been around for nearly four decades.

"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," said Colin Jahoda, PhD, professor of stem cell sciences at Durham University, according to a news release.

Researchers looked at dermal papillae from seven human donors that were then grown in a tissue culture. Other growths were attended and the cells were then transplanted back to the mice who had human skin grafted on their backs.

Results showed that five out of seven mice had new hair for the last six weeks. Genetic tests were then conducted to show that hair belonged to the hair donors.

As rodent papillae clump together, this aggregation helps the papillae share both information and stimulate hair-growth via surrounding skin cells.

At this time, as there is no cure for balding in humans, this additional research could one day supply some with a new treatment for hair loss.

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Want to find out more about the process? Check out this video, courtesy of YouTube.