Showh some Support for an interview with the german researchers at the TU Berlin.

[RichardDawkins]

9 votes plus one so i say lets hit it i need something for my collection ^^

[Mojo Risin]

Never happened.

[PatientlyWaiting]

What exactly have they done? Can somebody link me.

[Mojo Risin]

''Lauster, a scientist at Berlin Technical University, says he's been able to regrow hair follicles from stem cells — the body's multipurpose cells that can be grown into any tissue in the human body. Such cells may be implanted onto the scalp, say researchers, so that dead follicles can be resurrected, and baldness consigned to the scrapheap of history.''

This is huge. Give that man a Nobel Prize if he can achieve that in the future.

[Flowers]

''Lauster, a scientist at Berlin Technical University, says he's been able to regrow hair follicles from stem cells — the body's multipurpose cells that can be grown into any tissue in the human body. Such cells may be implanted onto the scalp, say researchers, so that dead follicles can be resurrected, and baldness consigned to the scrapheap of history.''

This is huge. Give that man a Nobel Prize if he can achieve that in the future.

Has there been an update? I know this was talked about in December. Definetely could be huge I can really see this happening

[Mojo Risin]

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2912821,00.html

That's a new article from today citing Roland Lauster but I have no idea what it's talking about (and it's kinda ****ed up with Google Translation). I think it's talking about skin regeneration and recreating the epidermis.

I think Roland Lauster research is funded by German government or some charity, I may be wrong though.

[Mojo Risin]

But the fact that the guy is Norwood 7 kinda cheers me up haha ! It's not like George Cotsarelis who's probably 40-50 years old and showing no sign of baldness.

Lauster could benefit from this stem cell treatment :P and he knows how losing hair sucks.

[Mojo Risin]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21277344

Across many tissues and organs, the ability to create an organoid, the smallest functional unit of an organ, in vitro is the key both to tissue engineering and preclinical testing regimes. The hair follicle is an organoid that has been much studied based on its ability to grow quickly and to regenerate after trauma. But hair follicle formation in vitro has been elusive. Replacing hair lost due to pattern baldness or more severe alopecia, including that induced by chemotherapy, remains a significant unmet medical need. By carefully analyzing and recapitulating the growth conditions of hair follicle formation, we recreated human hair follicles in tissue culture that were capable of producing hair. Our microfollicles contained all relevant cell types and their structure and orientation resembled in some ways excised hair follicle specimens from human skin. This finding offers a new window onto hair follicle development. Having a robust culture system for hair follicles is an important step towards improved hair regeneration as well as to an understanding of how marketed drugs or drug candidates, including cancer chemotherapy, will affect this important organ.

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Man this is huge, why is nobody talking about this ?

[UK_]

Die aber erfüllt dann auch nur einen Teil der Funktionen einer vollständigen, lebendigen Haut. Michael Meurer vom Universitätsklinikum Dresden: "Die neue Haut die entsteht, ist eine volle Epidermis, eine volle Oberhaut. Inklusive der Hornschicht, die für den Schutz der Haut so wichtig ist. Sie enthält aber keine Haare – denn das fragen Patienten oft – die werden nicht gebildet. Auch keine Schweiß- oder Talgdrüsen." Also auch hier nur ein Teilerfolg. Schwitzen ist gesund und: Schweiß- und Talgdrüsen sind notwendig für eine intakte, lebende Haut. Sie ist das Organ, mit dem wir tasten und empfinden.

New skin but no follicles or sebaceous glands?

Bollocks!

Die Hoffnung der Wissenschaftler: eine vollständige Haut soll wachsen, mit Haaren, Schweiß- und Talgdrüsen

Hope? I thought they had already done it last December & in their March release (@Mojo Risin post) - what gives?

From what I gather, after all the hype last year they're still in the initial stages of "testing", I give credit to these guys though, the number of our troops coming home from the middle east, Afghanistan and Iraq with horrific injuries would really benefit from this type of treatment.

This guy deserves more than a nobel prize if he can pull off growing a fully functioning section of skin as he proposes.

But holistic developments are still racing onward:

http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/09...-into-patient/

http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/09...printer-video/

[UK_]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21277344

Across many tissues and organs, the ability to create an organoid, the smallest functional unit of an organ, in vitro is the key both to tissue engineering and preclinical testing regimes. The hair follicle is an organoid that has been much studied based on its ability to grow quickly and to regenerate after trauma. But hair follicle formation in vitro has been elusive. Replacing hair lost due to pattern baldness or more severe alopecia, including that induced by chemotherapy, remains a significant unmet medical need. By carefully analyzing and recapitulating the growth conditions of hair follicle formation, we recreated human hair follicles in tissue culture that were capable of producing hair. Our microfollicles contained all relevant cell types and their structure and orientation resembled in some ways excised hair follicle specimens from human skin. This finding offers a new window onto hair follicle development. Having a robust culture system for hair follicles is an important step towards improved hair regeneration as well as to an understanding of how marketed drugs or drug candidates, including cancer chemotherapy, will affect this important organ.

------------------------------

Man this is huge, why is nobody talking about this ?

You should read the full article, it will blow your mind what they actually did.

"By producing hair follicles in vitro with a robust, reproducible
method, we have created a good jumping-off point for further
work on at least two application areas: cultivating hair for transplantation
for cosmetic purposes (e.g. treating severe alopecia,
male pattern baldness or chemotherapy-induced alopecia) or for
medium-to high-throughput screening of drug candidates to determine
their impact on hair growth."

"A cell therapy approach with well-engineered microfollicles
could be used that involved removing only a small quantity
of autologous (self) follicle-forming cells and expanding them ex
vivo before reimplantation.Patients with severe alopecia characterized
by a limited number of transplantable hair follicle units
could benefit from higher quantities of such hair follicle equivalents.
Since hair follicles are immune-privileged sites with a very
low expression of MHC class Ia antigens and suppressed MHC IIdependent
antigen presentation in addition to the local production
of immunosuppressants capable of downregulatingMHCI (TGF-1,
-MSH) (Paus et al., 2005), the tantalizing possibility exists of creating
allogeneic (non-self) transplants on a one-at-a-time or even
off-the-shelf basis."