One holy grail of the hair loss world would be the ability to grow artificial hair in the lab.
A team of researchers in Japan’s Yokohama National University (reported in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology ) grew hair follicles in the lab for the first time. In mammals, hair follicles are produced by the dividing embryo. Replicating this is a very difficult task as in the lab, to provide the right nutrients and environment is complex. The researchers in Japan studied and used a mouse hair follicle organoid which is a simple version of an organ (stem cell).
They examined various conditions which included growth factors, activators and inhibitors of signalling pathways and essential culture medium components and assembled a growing gel for the nourishment of the mice embryonic cells which allowed the cells to be reprogrammed into hair follicle cells. The hair follicles grew for up to one month, reaching up to 3 millimetres which corresponded to the length of mice hair cycle.
This research is at a very early stage and the team is now working to recreate the experiment using human cells.
In the future if this research comes to fruition, it would imply that, one might be able to take hair from someone whose hair is really lush and make it grow in the lab and then use those follicles to carry out a transplant instead of the current practice which involves harvesting the hair follicles from the occipital area (donor area) and transplanting into the bald area.