Hair from stem cells has taken root on the skin of mice
Baldness can be treated with stem cells
It is impossible to use dermal papilla cells directly for hair transplantation, since there are very few of them, besides, in culture they very quickly lose their ability to form hair follicles.
Currently, only one way to combat baldness is used – transplanting existing hair follicles to bald areas of the head. However, this operation cannot be performed in patients who lack the necessary supply of hair follicles.
"We created a method using human pluripotent stem cells, which we turned into cells responsible for hair formation. This method is a completely new approach to the treatment of baldness. And it has many advantages over the traditional method of hair follicle transplantation. One of the main advantages of this method is that the number of stem cells is not limited by the availability of existing follicles," explains the study's lead author Alexey Terskikh from the Sanford–Burnham Medical Research Institute (in a press release Using Stem Cells to Grow New Hair - VM).
In their research, scientists used human embryonic stem cells – these are cells from a blastocyst that develops on the 2nd-5th day after fertilization. The source of embryonic stem cells is unused blastocysts after in vitro fertilization (IVF). The value of these cells for biomedicine is that they are pluripotent – they are able to form different tissues and can turn into 220 different types of specialized cells.
Using a special technique, scientists turned embryonic stem cells into a neural crest. And then dermal papilla cells were obtained from the cells of the neural crest.
As the authors write, dermal papilla cells play an important role in regulating the hair growth cycle. Moreover, it is known that they trigger the formation of hair follicles.
"The dermal papilla cells we obtained in culture worked in the same way as in the human body – we observed how they isolated markers typical of these cells," the scientists write in their article published in the latest issue of the journal PLOS One (Gnedeva et al., Derivation of Hair–Inducing Cell from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells).
The next step of the experiment was to transplant the obtained cells into the skin of mice, where they perfectly took root.
A picture from an article in PLOS One: hair on the skin of a naked mouse.
The size of the ruler is 1 mm (VM).
Now, according to scientists, they plan to proceed to the next stage of research and try to transplant dermal papilla cells obtained in this way into the human body.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.01.2015