So if assaults by freeze-dried saw palmetto berries and the butt-kickers at The Salk Institute weren’t enough, Angela Christiano and her team have come up with a few new tweaks to the standard method for regrowing those stubborn hair cells.
Normally, a patch of hair-cells called Dermal Papillae are extracted from a skin-patch and then if all goes well, duplicated in a lab.
However most of the time, this process doesn’t go well for reasons we don’t yet completely understand.
But in Angela’s new twist, instead of just laying the cells out flat on a petri-dish, in what’s essentially a 2-dimensional structure, they laid them out on a piece of test-tissue and then turned the whole apparatus periodically.
AHA! -This allowed the papillae to set up a more 3-Dimensional structure instead.
And the results?…
Over 70% of the test-mice the skin-patches were grafted-to had hair growing, even as far out as the 6-week-mark. +AND, And, And: the hair in the patch contained the DNA of the original donors!!!
YOUR MOVE, TRUMP.
-SO: Hopefully, this new technique can pave the way forward for more sufferers of alopecia, or male-pattern/age-related baldness getting successful hair-regrowth.
-Even though nobody’s really sure why this dimensional-enhancement seems to help.
Now all they need to do is culture the cells directly from the patient’s own stem-cells and replicate as many as they need, at any time, onto a more generic scaffold than the type they used in the experiment.
(don’t laugh, and definitely don’t make terrible puns about the substrate or the name of the source study journal when you read the links to find out exactly what it is.)
PS: An interesting idea. -What if hair-cell replication isn’t the only tissue-rebuild process that could get a boost from the 3D-Spinning-Structure treatment? I wonder what some other low-return experiments there are out there in need of it.
More details at the Links:
Photo Credits:
“Upside-down”, by Tallia
Links:
• Source: Forbes
• via: Geekosystem
• Source Study: PNAS-Microenvironmental reprogramming by three-dimensional culture enables dermal papilla cells to induce de novo human hair-follicle growth
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