We are born with all hair follicles, which contain hair stem cells. But the human body is not able to reproduce new ones over the course of life. And if, unfortunately, the latter are altered or destroyed by a disease or a hereditary factor, you don’t make any more and you lose your hair… But researchers may have found a way to remedy this problem, as revealed by the MIT Technology Review.
To combat hair loss, baldnessthe researchers worked on reprogram cells to “convert” them into hair stem cells, by modifying the action of active genes inside. In short, the objective is to change the function of the cell, as if they were reprogramming it.
Mice with human hair
Concretely, they took skin cells which they transformed into cells capable of making hair. But once reprogrammed, these cells must be able to develop somewhere… To do this, they transplanted them to mice and pigs, which ended up with human hair shoots. A mouse image has also been shared.
dNovo hair has successfully reprogrammed human hair stem cells to grow actual hair in mice after transplantation:https://t.co/Llb8CvpqDy
— HairLossCure2020 (@HLcure2020) January 20, 2022
That said, this is only one step. The MIT Technology Review describes this fight against baldness as a lucrative business where many companies claim to have found the miracle solution. The goal is to be able to reimplant these modified cells in people whose hair is falling out, but we’re not there yet. Especially since the hair follicles are particularly complex organsaccording to the researchers.
Source: MIT Technology Review.
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