There is no legitimate cure for baldness. You can fly you and your receding hairline to Turkey to get a hair replacement procedure, and you can take a cocktail of meds that can slow or even pause hair loss. But pausing and then reversing hair loss isn’t really possible… though we are getting closer.
Researchers in the United States and Japan have successfully grown functional hair follicles in a lab that naturally cycle through periods of growth, something scientists have struggled to achieve for years. The study, published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, singles out a key biological ingredient that previous experiments didn’t consider.
Lab-Grown Hair Follicles Could Be the Future of Baldness Treatment
Until now, most attempts to grow hair follicles in laboratory conditions have relied on two types of cells: epithelial stem cells, which actually produce hair, and dermal papilla cells, which send signals telling hair when to grow. In previous experiments, researchers found that they could form early follicle structures, but the follicles didn’t act like the real thing, rendering them useless. The big problem was that the follicles did not connect to the surrounding tissue, often needing to be transplanted first before they would start acting anything like normal hair.
That problem might have been solved. The breakthrough came when researchers added a third component: accessory mesenchymal cells. These cells act like structural support, helping form the follicle’s surrounding tissue and stabilizing the area referred to as the “bulge,” the all-important zone where the actual hair growth happens.
Once that third cell type was introduced at the earliest stages, the lab-grown follicle began behaving more like natural hair follicles, as it attached to surrounding tissue and progressed through normal hair growth cycles without needing to be transplanted first.
It should be noted that all the experiments were conducted in mice, and human trials have not yet begun. There’s also that pesky little matter of getting the experiments to work at scale and figuring out how to safely transplant them to human scalps. In other words, there’s still a lot of work ahead. That said, this research hints at a possible path to regenerating hair follicles that stopped forming naturally.
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