Cultured Follicles Offer Hope for Beating Baldness

A decade ago, scientists at Columbia University and Durham University made a significant breakthrough in hair restoration techniques. They discovered that by using a 100-year-old technique known as hanging-drop culture, they could successfully grow human hair follicles from cultured cells. The method involved placing human papilla cells in droplets of a carrier medium, allowing them to cluster together in a three-dimensional configuration. When these cells were implanted under hairless human skin grafted onto a rat, they induced the development of follicles. The hanging-drop method restored normal function to about 22% of nearly 4,000 genes disrupted when grown on a flat surface, including several associated with hair growth. However, the new follicles did not always produce a hair through the skin, lacked pigment and sebaceous oil glands, indicating further research was needed before the method could be applied clinically.