Human Hair Growth Ex Vivo Is Correlated With In Vivo Hair Growth: Selective Categorization of Hair Follicles for More Reliable Hair Follicle Organ Culture

The study from 2005 investigated whether selecting human hair follicles based on their in vivo growth rate could improve the consistency of ex vivo hair follicle culture results. Occipital scalp samples from three volunteers were used to isolate anagen VI follicles, which were then categorized into four groups and some were cultured for six days. The results showed that in vitro hair growth was closely correlated with in vivo hair growth rates, and that minoxidil significantly increased hair growth in follicles presumed to be at a similar early anagen VI stage. This suggests that selecting follicles at a specific growth stage can lead to more reliable hair follicle organ culture experiments. The study involved a small number of participants (three) and a range of 11 to 15 hair follicles per group. The research was funded by the Korea Health 21 R&D Project, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Republic of Korea.