October 21, 2013

expert reaction to study on triggering human hair follicle growth

Researchers publishing in PNAS have triggered the development of human hair follicles from dermal papilla cells in 3D culture conditions in the laboratory.

Prof Sheila MacNeil, Professor of Tissue Engineering at the University of Sheffield, said:

“This is a really useful piece of information showing that if attention is paid to keeping human dermal papilla cells together in sufficiently high numbers then they can act to send a signal to ‘grow hair’ when transplanted into human skin grafted onto mice as a test bed model.

“It really adds to our understanding of what is needed for cells to signal to each other and opens up an approach to further research towards clinical translation. This is ground-breaking work – congratulations to this creative team.”

“Microenvironmental reprogramming by three-dimensional culture enables dermal papilla cells to induce de novo human hair-follicle growth,” by Claire Higgins et al. published in PNAS on Monday 21 October 2013.