Possible Cure for Baldness - Endless supply of donor Hair?

[Westonci]

http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ten.tec.2010.0477

Can someone access the article through a University Subscription, and share it with us?

[Westonci]

"The ability to reconstitute adult skin with functional skin appendages has long been a major clinical objective for dermatologist and surgeons. To this end Lichti et al. was the first to show that it is possible to use disassociated hair precursor cells to have de novo formation of hair follicles in vivo. Their protocol is now widely used to mix disassociated multipotential dermal and epidermal stem cells from newborn mouse skin to form hairs. This assay and its modifications have been used to test the ability of hair bulge stem cells from adult mice to form hairs.

Lichti’s chamber procedure is an achievement towards the de novo formation of new hair follicles. However, the procedure takes longer time to perform. It also requires a specialized chamber to fit the wound shape, and the animal has to carry the cumbersome chamber during the wound healing process for a week. Although it is a useful assay for evaluating the efficacy of stem cell candidates to form hairs, it is not practical for a larger-scale screening or future clinical applications. A simplified procedure was developed by injecting much smaller amounts of disassociated precursor cells underneath the skin of mice. In comparison, the procedure (called the patch assay by its authors) is much easier to perform, and allows for large-scale screening. However, most of the time the patch assay leads to the formation of misaligned hair filaments growing in subcutaneous cysts. While these hair follicles cycle, they cannot cycle normally. This this procedure is useful for evaluating the efficacy of moleculres or candidate cells on hair formation in a short-term basis.

Therefore, while useful procedures have been developed and progress has been made, there is still a need to develop a simple and high-throughput procedure that can generate a large number of pilosebaceous units with clinically acceptable appearance. Earlier, our laboratory was able to use dissociated feather precursor cells to reconstitute feather follicles in vitro. These feather follicles were formed on a plane with proper arrangement and orientation. This was done in vitro by allowing dissociated mesenchymal cells to form a high density cell suspension. Within a few hours, these cells generated their natural matrix. Epidermis was then laid on top. In this composite, feather progenitor cells self organized to form periodically arranged feather follicles. Based on this experience, we now devise a new procedure that allows mouse precursor cells to generate a large number of hair follicles which are arranged properly in a plane. These hair follicles can cycle and regenerate and the reconstituted skin can heal after injury. While this line of research is still a work in progress, this procedure represents a significant step forward towards practical application in the future."

[rapunzal]

awesome, so another hair loss treatment for mice. bald mice will soon be extinct if scientists keep making these discoveries.

mice 25 vs humans 0

[clee984]

awesome, so another hair loss treatment for mice. bald mice will soon be extinct if scientists keep making these discoveries.

mice 25 vs humans 0

Laughed my ass off at that!